The Monologist
A collection of stories and a novella
by Patrick Keppel
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Contents
A Knock at Midnight
In the Basement of the Psychoanalysis Museum
The Monologist (novella)
The Secret
Tulunasia Park
A Vectorial History of Leroy Pippin
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I imagine that I see myself through a multiplying glass—all
the forms that move around me are myselfs; and whatever
they do, or leave undone, vexes me.
—E.T.A. Hoffmann, diary entry, 1809
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A Knock at Midnight
Stefan Mauer jerked his head out of the water, spluttering, gasping for breath.
Clinging to the edge of the tub, he felt about in the darkness for a towel and rubbed the
sting out of his eyes. At last he could manage a faint smile—it was after all possible to
fall asleep in the bath. Why, he might have drowned! And it would have been his
mother’s fault, he laughed; she’d nearly begged him to take this bath, as though somehow
it were essential to his being that he experience the luxury of their fine new tub, soaking
to the point of eternal languor in its bubbling, whirling jets. Oh, yes! She had drawn the
water for him, opened a new bar of soap, laid out three layers of brilliant white towels.
This same Mother would have checked on him in an hour or so, knocking faintly at the
door, and then a little louder . . . Stefan? No answer—just that endless, tinny version of
“Good King Wenceslas” bouncing all around the quiet house, mocking her. Alarmed, she
would have gone to wake his father, who would bang on the door three times with his
fist, Come on, Stefan, let’s move it! and then finally just turn the knob, for the door was
after all unlocked, and—shriek! The holiday which had gone so splendidly up until then,
the whole Mauer family together once more at the old newly renovated homestead, would
be ruined. Stefan’s siblings and their excellent, handsome families had all left earlier that
day (after their baths), but now they would have to return: The Black Christmas. Years
later the tragedy would be a lesson, a warning, to them all: be prosperous, marry young,
have many children, keep your religion—and you won’t drown in the bathtub!
Oh, but that moral wouldn’t sit well with the younger generation of Mauers,
Stefan’s nieces and nephews, who as they grew into painful adolescence would no doubt
feel compelled to idealize him—their brilliant Uncle Stefan, the only relative who would
have understood. For a time they would bristle whenever their parents said anything
which even slightly implied that Stefan had had his faults, had a chip on his shoulder, say,
or took the world too seriously. “You’re all just jealous of him, you’re glad he’s dead!”
they’d scream and storm up to their rooms, then whisper to his ghost when alone; perhaps
5
on at least one marvelous occasion they’d even manage to see him in their dreams, gently
telling them not to worry, they were doing fine. Later they would write moving memoirs
of him in their composition classes: An excellent example of the power of the word. You
have brought your uncle to life! (Watch redundancy): A-. But then in time they too
would begin to forget; one by one they would be pulled back into the safe, narrow world
they’d been breathing since birth, would sink deeply into watery reproductions of their
parents’ lives and freeze over like a chain of ponds in winter—all save perhaps one
stubborn lamb. Stefan thought he knew already who this would be, his brother Peter’s
youngest daughter Stephanie (what a mistake to have fated her thus with this name!),
whose first words to her Uncle Stefan when at the age of six she discovered the strange
pleasure in family taxonomy were so precisely to the point: “My father never laughs, and
you’re laughing all the time!”
No, Stephanie would never surrender, and so would follow her uncle’s tragic
course. At every opportunity this young, tormented soul would step outside her family’s
carefully drawn boundaries—would turn a cold shoulder to profit and property and
squander her high marks instead on the tattered academic fringe of the theatre, or some
other useless art form; would marry someone the family disapproved of and divorce
quietly several years later, childless; and then would pare herself down to her books and
music and maybe two friends and live like a monk or an alchemist in a grimy corner of a
sagging metropolis. And despite it all, this neo-Stefan would insist to the rest of her
family that she was happy; her way was less comfortable, more lonely, but (as her
siblings would know deep down) more true as well—not an inherited, blueprint life, but a
world all of her own making. Nevertheless, thus would she die, suddenly and painfully at
the age of thirty-three, the victim of an accident, a slight miscalculation, humiliated,
exposed as a fraud: There! She should have stayed inside.
Stefan shivered in his steamy bath, groaned into his towel. Even in jest such
fantasies were childish, absurd. Besides, he certainly had far less reason than most to
complain about his family; in fact, often during his youth (well, once yesterday too) he’d
wished they’d been openly cruel to him—locked him in dark closets or plunged him into
freezing baths—instead of simply selfish and banal. For it was precisely something like
that, as he’d begun to see recently, that he was missing as a writer: a monstrous tragedy
lurking at the center of his life, something compelling and horribly clear which he would
have had both to flee from in terror and confront with enormous courage. It would have
tried to crush him at every step, yet he would have fed off it too. Oh, he’d seen it in
others; it was unmistakable when it was for real. It made one supremely confident no
matter what happened; it even made one a little cruel.
Stefan had no such tragedy in his life, or not enough of one anyway—not to make
art, as he’d dreamed. He could teach the subject well enough; every year his passion and
intensity won him many wide-eyed disciples. But the possibility was beginning to haunt
him that no matter how hard he worked or how much he wished it, he would create no
such tragedy himself . . . and that maybe it was time he gave up trying.
Stefan stood up fast into the chill, so that his eyes went dark with the blood
rushing from his head. Quickly, one might almost say desperately, he wrapped himself in
a towel and stood for a long moment listening to the shrill ringing in his ears, feeling the
heavy, thumping pulse in his temples. Finally he emitted something like a growl and
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gave his head a hard shake: Just go home and forget everything. Yes, that was all it was;
he always felt like this at the end of his visits home, exhausted from trying desperately to
fit in on the one hand and to detach himself on the other, presenting a riddle not one of
them could solve, least of all himself: I am one of you, yet not one of you: Who am I? . .
. Right. On the plane tomorrow he would feel dazed and dismal, but then the following
day after a good night’s sleep within his own four walls—fortified by the colorful tiers of
books, the delicate Japanese woodcuts that hung over his desk like windows to his soul,
and the gauzy string serenades pervading him as subtly as breath—he would wake to who
he really was, and recall what happened back here, these petty humiliations, only as a bad
dream he would soon forget.
“And then he could enjoy life again,” Stefan was ready to add, but suddenly he
stopped his toweling and stared into the tub, into the quiet vortex of the draining water.
And what was that dream he’d just been having, there, in the bath? Something terrible,
he was quite sure, but it eluded him now, fluttered like a moth against dim light, and then
was gone. Stefan breathed a heavy sigh, shivered off the faint dust the dream had left
behind, then pulled on his clothes and wandered into the kitchen to boil some water for
tea.
“Peter-Thomas-Mary-Stefan?” his mother called from the living room. She
always stuttered through the names of all her children before she landed upon his. It was
an annoying habit, and Stefan was slow to respond, as though to punish her.
“Stefan!” she called out again, an odd touch of fear in her voice.
“Yes, yes, it’s me,” he answered impatiently.
“What are you doing?”
“Making tea.”
“Oh, good! Have some tea!” She paused a moment, then added all in a rush,
“Well, how about that, huh? What did you think of that?”
Stefan frowned, genuinely confused. “About what?”
“About the bath!” his mother sang. It’s great, isn’t it? We feel like we’re in a spa.
We sit there and look out the window at the view. It’s like an inn. That’s what the
Knapps said when we had them up. You remember the Knapps? We went from room to
room, and their mouths just dropped. They said, ‘Wow! This is like a country inn!’ Isn’t
it cozy here?”
“Oh, yes,” Stefan said, wincing. There was a time, almost ten years ago now,
when he’d decided he would help his mother overcome this compulsion to ramble on and
on about how happy she was. He would act as her confessor, her refuge in the family, the
only one with whom she could throw off her quilt of delusions and admit the truth. They
would converse as they never had before, relying upon one another as they would their
most trusted friends, perhaps even more so. And at first there were a few startling
moments when through his persistent questioning she’d broken down in tears, recalling
times, awful scenes, when her father, vice-president of the cement mill that owned the
small town they now lived in, came home drunk with or without his women and slapped
her mother if she objected, or even if she didn’t; and how her mother on her deathbed
warned her that she’d have to step in quickly to “rescue” her much younger sister, though
from exactly what neither could bring herself to say.
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And once the dam had cracked a little wider, Stefan’s mother had proved willing,
even anxious, to let loose a steady stream of reproaches against Stefan’s father as well—
though first Stefan had had to learn not to be so quick to direct its course. For instance, in
one of their early sessions, when he was only a year or so out of college and Stefan’s
father was away on business, Stefan and his mother spent a whole evening lounging in the
living room, getting flushed with wine and splitting a secret pack of cigarettes—even now
she hid the fact that she sometimes smoked from the other Mauers. For a while she went
on and on about how large and lovely her family’s old home was, and how despite the
abuses, “There was at least a sense of refinement all around.” Then all at once she
stopped, gave a light scoff and said what a shock it was that she’d ended up with such a
man as Stefan’s father; after all, everyone in those days knew that she, Rivers White of
Strawberry Hill, could have had anyone in town. But “for some odd reason,” she said,
she’d ignored all her rich, handsome suitors and instead plucked from the earth below a
mate who was markedly uneducated and awkward, a mill worker’s son, no less.
“Well, of course!” Stefan had interjected with a laugh. “You wanted someone as
much unlike your father as possible. It was your way of fighting back! You never
thought your father would approve, but when he found out Grandma and Grandpa were
sitting on property every cement mill in the county had its eye on, it was a deal.”
The last detail Grandma Mauer had let slip to him not too long before she died,
and Stefan instantly regretted mentioning it. For a moment his mother stared back at him
in deep confusion bordering on terror. “Oh, no, not that!” she said suddenly, “That wasn’t
it at all. It was just because your father seemed so kind and good-hearted,” she added,
then lapsed at once into the familiar romance she’d spun hundreds of times: The Girl
Who Followed Her Heart, Not Her Purse (. . . And Was Rewarded Even So!)
So from then on, Stefan had withheld his analyses; whenever he sensed his mother
drawing near the truth, he’d bite his tongue and let her drift on further and further, until at
last she was simply there. . . .Yes, yes—the plan was to mold Peter Mauer into her ideal
man, but apparently she’d underestimated the coarseness of the clay. True, she’d
managed to push him so hard about money that he actually pulled himself out of the mill
and made a good salary in the ink and dye business. However, although she’d worked
diligently to refine his manners and prejudices, he was always an embarrassment at social
gatherings, and at home he was often so vulgar and mean she’d finally had to insist he
leave raising the children entirely to her. Not that he was ever cruel, as her father had
been, but having been raised with little tenderness in this crude old Mauer farmhouse
(“They thought I was spoiled because I wanted them to put in a bathroom!” she often
bitterly recalled), he just didn’t know how to respond to family matters of a delicate or
emotional nature. “Every one of you nearly died!” Stefan’s mother once told him angrily.
“Remember Mary’s cyst? Your burst appendix? Oh, but your father—what goes on in
his head? When it was all over, he’d say, ‘See? You made a big fuss for nothing!’ Oh,
it’s a wonder I’m not
. . . sick!”
Her eyes had filled with tears, but the moment Stefan had reached across the
couch to touch her hand, she recoiled and hurried to take it all back: no, no, it didn’t
matter, not a bit of it; at bottom, her husband, even her father, were both “good men”—
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they worked hard, they were excellent providers, they were very kind and sweet deep
down.
Despite these inevitable retractions, Stefan had thought his mother was making
progress—especially toward the end of her father’s dismal, self-imposed dissipation,
during which she alone of the remaining Whites had bothered to care for him. Every
weekend for nearly seven years, often against the wishes of the Mauers, she visited him in
his tiny apartment which he vehemently insisted he was too sick to leave, and which out
of sheer perversity he kept absurdly hot, dim and bare. There was nothing for her to
gain—by then he’d thrown away nearly all his money—but she dutifully washed and
combed and at last even diapered him as if he were her fifth child; she even made a few
genuine attempts to save his immortal soul from the fires of hell that were licking eagerly
at his bedsores. But for all this attention she was rewarded only with the most bitter
curses and reproaches, and last words which Stefan sometimes dryly quoted to his drama
class as an example of how rare it was when someone actually died as people did on
stage, with a characteristic exit line: “Rivers, you blind idiot! The lightswitch is right by
the door!”
Since it was apparent all along that she was not going to receive even a tiny bit of
the approval she was so desperately seeking from her father, Stefan had been worried that
when the end finally came his mother might suffer an emotional breakdown of some kind.
However, at the funeral this past March she had seemed unusually calm and lucid—so
much so that Stefan had really begun to hope that she would undergo a sudden
metamorphosis, that all that heavy pain from the past, all that fear, would just drop away
from her, useless in this new life, and there she’d stand in a kind of quiet awe: how
simple it was after all to be alive and free! And why not? Such things did happen to
people, if rarely. Indeed, after fitting together a few odd pieces in her behavior—that
careful, sustained glance out the window, that sudden smile that had lit her face as she
made her way up the stairs alone—Stefan had even believed it possible that she had been
consciously looking forward to this day, preparing herself in luxurious secrecy for the
ecstatic moment when at last she could step out from behind the curtain she’d drawn over
her life and thrill in the light to the sound of her own true voice. She had confessed to
him once that she’d always dreamed of trying to write, as he was; well, now she would
write—yes, she’d write it all down, all those thoughts and experiences too long ignored, a
paper reality of her dreams, not for the public, not for her family, and not for Stefan
(though of course he’d be only too happy to encourage her if she found her first attempts
too trying), but for herself alone.
However, ever since then—what had gone wrong?—she had turned in the
opposite direction. Now she rambled day and night about the work they’d had done on
the old Mauer farmhouse—gutting the humble dwelling as rock-solid and square as its
previous owners and transforming it into a great big burgeoning thing right out of
Country Living, with the latest in cathedral ceilings and sun rooms, all exploitive of view.
This was supposed to be the crowning achievement to her happy life; at last she could
live according to those famous folksy lines she and nearly every woman of her generation
and class had cross-stitched as a girl: Let Me Live in My House by the Side of the Road
and Be a Friend to Man. This little motto was everywhere in the house, most
prominently in a bright red tapestry that hung down over the balcony above their new
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living room. Oh, she was relentless now; every moment of her day she spent weaving
still more evidence into the fabric of her happiness, wrapping it round and round like a
silk shroud, and then almost perversely holding it up for all the world to see, no matter
how sadly transparent or shabby it actually was. In a couple of weeks she would send
Stefan an envelope crammed with snapshots she’d taken during his visit, pictures of him
with this brother or that nephew, their backs stiff, their smiles weary and strained. On the
reverse she would write for posterity’s sake the date and names of the people in the
picture, and then a little caption like “This is great!” or “So warm and cozy!” Her life
thus labeled, it must be so.
No, she was beyond help now; there was nothing left for Stefan to do but humor
her, as his siblings did, or else ignore her entirely, as his father had done for their entire
marriage.
“Stefan?!”
“What?”
“Isn’t it cozy?”
“I said it’s very nice,” Stefan shouted, his eyes fixed on the coils beneath the tea
kettle. He would be damned if he said the word cozy.
His mother shuffled into the kitchen, her tiny frame smothered in an immense
blue bathrobe. “Oh, you! Why don’t you like the house? We’ve put so much work into
it! And now it’s finally done—well, except for the deck. Everyone else likes it!”
“It’s your house now, and you can do what you like with it,” Stefan said coolly.
“But I don’t have to like it.”
“Oh, really? Well, what do you like?”
Stefan gave a shrug. “I liked the old house. Grandma’s house.”
“But it was too small for us!” his mother erupted. “Where would we put
everything? Where would everybody stay?”
“I don’t know,” Stefan said wearily. “Look, it doesn’t matter.”
“But it does!”
“It doesn’t!” Stefan said sharply, then paused and allowed a warm smile to spread
across his face. “All right, you really want to know what I like?” he said gently, moving
over to the doorway that led to the front hall, which was built a foot higher than the
kitchen. He bent down and rested his hand on the step, as though it were an old dog
asleep. “I like this step. All these years, and I’ve never noticed it. See how the wood has
worn away at the edge? Feel that. It’s so soft—it’s like the lip of a clay pot . . .
Smoothed by the steps of so many thousands of people. By pure, simple life. The
simplest thing we have, a step.”
Stefan’s mother gave a light scoff. “What are you talking about?”
“The whole house was like this,” Stefan said, appealing to her. “This step is all
that’s left.”
“Well, it’s dangerous too,” his mother said, bristling. “You could slip on that and
conk your head. And how would you like it if we didn’t have a bathroom? How would
you like to have to go outside in the freezing cold?”
“You must know by now that I’d enjoy that immensely,” Stefan said, rising and
returning to the stove. “And let’s not even start talking about those old sheds.”
“They blocked the view!”
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“They were the view! Not just the outhouse, but Grandpa’s workshop!” he
added, as though casting shame on her.
“Everything in there was covered with filth!”
“You didn’t even ask the rest of us.”
“Why? None of you uses tools.”
Stefan looked away, somewhat caught by this line of reasoning. “No, but . . . I
just liked being there,” he said softly. “I liked looking at all those jars of nails and screws
lined up so neatly on the shelves. And the racks of old saws he saved, and the little scraps
of wood. And the mousetraps still waiting to be sprung—“
“There was nothing of value in there, we checked.”
“It felt like him in there!” Stefan said. “It was where he went to get away from
everything.”
“Well, it was in the way! It’s our house now—“
“Yes, yes, that’s fine! I said that to begin with.” Stefan sighed and shook his
head. I’m finished with all this. “Look, just forget it; it doesn’t matter to me, it really
doesn’t.”
Stefan’s mother crossed her arms. “Well, I don’t know how you got this way,”
she said. “No one else is. I think it’s just a pose.”
“You’re right, that’s it,” Stefan nodded. “It’s just a pose.” Stefan frowned at the
kettle—what on earth was taking so long? He felt the side of the kettle, and then the coil
beneath; both were cold.
“Oh, that one’s broken,” Stefan’s mother said lightly.
Stefan glared at her. “You just got this stove!”
“I know. We don’t know what’s wrong with it,” she said, mystified. “We’ll call
and have someone come look at it tomorrow. Good thing it’s not Grandma’s old coal
stove. Who would we call then?”
Stefan muttered something that sounded sufficiently like agreement, then moved
the kettle to another burner and went over to the sink to pour a glass of water.
His mother followed him tentatively, then after a moment came up from behind
and gave him a gentle squeeze. “Oh, it’s been so good to have you here, Stefan,” she
said. “All my chicks are gone but the baby. Hey! It’s your day today. ‘On the feast of
Ste-phen . . .’” She forced a laugh and lapsed into baby-talk. “‘Member?”
Stefan grimaced behind a half-smile. He peered out the window at the slab of
concrete that covered the spot where the sheds had been, and beyond that at the shadowy
field, a pristine winter wasteland of frozen dirt and dead cornstalks. Just then a bright
white light shone down, and Stefan took a step back, stunned. “What is that?”
“Oh, that’s the spotlight,” his mother said, pleased. “It comes on by itself.”
The concrete slab was now illuminated like a stage, surrounded by a taut
hexagonal string of stakes marking the space for the new deck. The field beyond had
vanished. “For what?!” Stefan said incredulously.
His mother was equally baffled. “To keep the burglars away!” Stefan scoffed at
her. “Yes! And the animals!”
“The animals!” Stefan said, rolling his eyes.
“Well, sure. Groundhogs do a lot of damage. And raccoons, and skunks—
“Terrifying.”
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“They might be rabid! They smell food.”
Stefan laughed at her. “I can’t believe I grew up thinking animals were devious.”
“Well, they are, especially out here,” Stefan’s mother said in deep earnest. “Give
them half a chance, they’ll find a way in.”
“—And dangerous, too. Like everything. Like the Boy Scouts—“
“Oh! Those leaders were bad, they’d have lost you in the woods. It happens,
Stefan!”
“—And riding a bicycle. And swimming. . .”
“Why are you blaming me?” Stefan’s mother said suddenly.
Stefan was taken aback. “I’m not,” he said tonelessly.
“I feel like you are.”
“Well, I’m not,” Stefan said, then added after a pause: “But you have to admit, it
was a good thing Thomas almost drowned in that motel pool, or we’d never have learned
to swim.”
Stefan’s mother grimaced. “Oh! Don’t remind me of that.”
“It was in the shape of a clover,” Stefan said—a detail he never forgot when
telling this story. “Our ball went into the deep leaf.”
“And you kept moving toward him! I kept telling you to stay back!”
“Your voice was ferocious, it was more like a growl. You were clawing through
the water; your eyes were like knives. And your teeth! I’d never seen you like that!”
“You kept wanting to help! It was awful!” Stefan’s mother squeezed her brow.
“Oh! What if I hadn’t been there?”
Stefan gave a shrug. “Thomas would have drowned. Maybe we both would
have.”
“Oh, don’t even say it!” Stefan’s mother shook her head rapidly, dried her eyes.
“How did we ever get on that? What were we talking about before?”
Stefan frowned indifferently; he knew he should feel guilty, but he just didn’t. “I
don’t know. The spotlight . . . the animals. . . ” Just go home and forget everything.
Stefan’s face lit up. “Wait. There it is!”
“What?” Stefan’s mother said, looking out the window. “Where what is?”
“No, not out there,” Stefan said, smiling. “It’s this dream I had. In the bath.”
Stefan’s mother was aghast. “You were sleeping in the bathtub?!”
“Yes!” Stefan laughed, then extended his hands and stared at the space between
them, as though conjuring the dream. “There were these strange lumpy animals . . . or
just thick shadows of them, it was so dark. . . . Oh, but first, I was going home.” Stefan
turned to the window. “ I had to cross the field—my house was on the other side.”
“Really?” Stefan’s mother beamed. “You know, you could have some of that
land right now if you wanted—anything up to the row of pines is ours.”
“But I just couldn’t do it; it was so . . . dark,” Stefan went on, trying hard to
concentrate; his dreams were like revelations to him, and he knew if he didn’t remember
this one now, he might never. “Oh, and you’d left the side door and a couple of windows
wide open, so I had to go back and close them first.”
“Well, that would never happen,” his mother said. “That’s the last thing I do
before I go to bed every night—set the alarm and try all the doors.”
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“Then I went back to the field,” Stefan said. “But it was so muddy—my foot sank
in up to the ankle. And then there was a storm rising over the pines, huge gusts of
wind—ah, yes! These clumps of dirt kept stinging my face, and I had to turn away for a
second. But when I turned back, the wind had stopped and there were these dense
clouds—but then they weren’t clouds at all, they were those animals. They were like . . .
buffalo, or wildebeests—I mean not really, they were just these strange, hairy, lumpy
things. They were almost sad. They seemed harmless enough—they ran off a little when
they saw me—but then the way they spread out, in a wide circle—” Stefan turned to his
mother and smiled broadly. “Well, they were sneaky!”
Stefan’s mother laughed incredulously. “Oh really, Stefan, this is all so
ridiculous,” she said. “I just don’t see the point. Why do people always make such a fuss
over dreams? I don’t dream, or if I do I can’t remember. To me, it’s just not necessary.
Not if you have God. Believing in dreams is like, I don’t know, believing in astrology, or
tarot cards . . .”
As she spoke, Stefan kept straining after the rest of the dream, but it was fading
from him fast, and at last was gone, lost in all the chatter. Vexed, he moved back over to
the stove and noticed that he’d placed the tea kettle on the wrong burner. He snatched up
the kettle and dropped it noisily on the coils that were lit.
“Oh, I do that all the time,” his mother laughed.
“It’s endless!” Stefan muttered to himself. “I’m done with all this!”
Stefan’s mother stared back at him. “What?” she asked, aggressive, but a little
frightened too. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Stefan turned and faced her. “Tell me about your plans for the deck.”
His mother’s face instantly brightened. “What? Oh! The deck, the deck, yes—
you haven’t seen those.” At once she scurried down the hall and into the study, where
she began searching for the plans. “The lumber is coming in March. We wanted the
builders to start right away, but they said the wood is pressure-treated and has to dry out
for a month or so. If you start before the preservative has dried, the wood shrinks in place
and leaves much bigger gaps between the boards than you want . . .”
Stefan followed her, but then stopped at the front door and stared out through the
curtain into the cold darkness, across the narrow road passing just in front of their porch
to the dead fields beyond, then back again to the surface of the glass, where his own face
was reflected, weary and flushed from his bath. He pressed his forehead to the glass and
kept it there, absorbing the cold sting, searching for that dream.
“. . . Dad thought it was just the opposite, that after all that pressure the wood
would expand like a balloon, but he doesn't know. . ."
And soon it began materializing in fragments, blurry stills that slowly bled into
the next until at last they blinked and rolled like an old film: the dark, empty field; the
open windows and doors; and then the mud, the sudden squall and the stinging flecks of
soil; and then at last out of a chain of dense, black clouds, those hapless animals that run
off when they see him, but never really go away, just stand lurking in the distance,
waiting . . . for what?
“ . . .They said in fact sometimes the wood shrinks so much it cracks! . . .”
He looks away for a moment, searching for some other way around, but when he
turns back he sees they’ve crept back closer to the edge of the field than before. They
13
stand there like slabs of stone, like the jagged crenelations of a ruined castle, the broken
arc of some ancient calendar . . .
“. . . I told them ‘Good! Let it dry out as long as possible!’ . . .”
Their huge black eyes stare off to one side or the other, but are watching him too;
certainly they are watching him. It’s amusing in a way, but he can’t quite bring himself to
pass through their ranks, their silent picket line. What do they want?
“. . . We don’t want any cracks or gaps, like the Knapps
have . . .”
He tries again to cross, but the same thing happens—first the mud, then the storm,
the clumps of dirt, and last the dusky clouds, the retreating, encroaching animals. What
are they guarding?
“. . . Oh, theirs is terrible! And only one level. Ours will have two levels, eightby-eight for the upper and ten-by-twelve for the lower, with a two-foot rise between. . . ”
Stefan pressed his face harder against the window, as though that would help him
see beyond the line of animals in the dream. But just then, a black glove reached up from
below and brushed hard twice against the glass.
Stefan jumped back as if he’d been struck, then slowly leaned into the window
again and peered out. On the porch stood a man in a black jacket. He was hunched over
and breathing heavily between low, incoherent moans, as though drunk. At last, after an
immense effort, he managed to pronounce one word: “H-hel-p.”
Stefan slowly backed away from the door and drifted in a kind of daze to the
study, where his mother was still rooting about for the plans for the deck. He approached
her timidly. “Did you . . . hear anything?”
His mother whirled around in terror. “What?! What?!” Just then the glove
scraped once again, louder this time, against the pane.
“There’s someone outside,” Stefan admitted.
“Oh my God, who is it?” Stefan’s mother cried.
Stefan shook his head. “I don’t know . . . Some guy . . .”
“Some guy?! Who?! We’re not expecting anyone at this hour! Oh, God—come
with me, come with me! Don’t let him in. We’re not letting him in.”
Together they sidled into the hallway, trying to be quiet. Stefan stood in front of
her and edged to the door, peeked out, and flicked on the porchlight.
A horrible sight! The man stood gazing into the harsh floodlight like some
grotesque wax figure, his face a bluish mask rivered with blood, the brightest red
imaginable. “H-help me-e!” he moaned, his lips freezing at last in a ghastly oval, red and
wet. This wisps of vapor twisted up and out of his mouth like a slow leak. “S-some-body
. . . h-help!”
Stefan withdrew from the door and turned to his mother, who was standing at the
other end of the hallway wringing her hands. “It’s a man,” Stefan said. “He’s bleeding.”
“Oh, God!” his mother said through her fist. “Don’t let him in, we can’t let him
in. It might be a trick. You know that’s how they do it sometimes. They get you to let
them in, and then they knock you over the head—what’s that?!”
Just then the tea kettle had begun its piercing shriek. All at once Stefan woke
from his daze and strode quickly past his mother into the kitchen and turned off the stove.
“We’ve got to help him—”
14
“No! Don’t let him in!” his mother shouted with desperate vehemence. “We
can’t do anything!”
Stefan snatched up the telephone receiver and waved it at her aggressively. “I’m
just dialing 9-1-1!”
“Oh, good—Wait! We don’t have 9-1-1 here.”
Stefan groaned. “Then what’s the number for the police?”
His mother bit her fist. “Oh God, I don’t know, I don’t know!”
“You don’t know the number for the police?!” Stefan snapped. He dialed the
operator and after being passed along many different channels, finally was connected to
the Bethlehem police. In a faltering voice he described what was happening—there had
been an accident, perhaps even a shooting!—and requested an ambulance. “We’re here
in Olivet—”
“Four Corners Road, number 4,” his mother said.
“Four Corners Road, number 4.”
“Take the left off the Pike at the nursery.”
“Take the left off the Pike at—”
“Where is the man now, Sir?” the young woman’s voice at the other end broke in.
“He’s on the porch,” Stefan said. “We haven’t let him in . . . just in case.” Stefan
thought he heard the woman snickering to herself. After a lengthy pause, she came back
on the line to tell him someone would be right over. Stefan thanked her awkwardly, then
slowly returned the receiver to its cradle.
“Oh, that’s good, thank God,” his mother breathed. “They’ll get here and take
care of it. I don’t know why I don’t have the number right there. For all those years
Grandma always kept the number right there—Stefan! Where are you going?” she
shouted as Stefan glided on by, his gaze fixed on the door, which drew him on like a
magnet. “Stay back here!”
Stefan stopped and turned on her angrily. “I’m just going to talk to him,” he said.
“Tell him that help is on the way.”
“Oh, good, good, that’s ok—but don’t go out there! Ah!—I’ll go wake Dad,” she
added, her face suddenly brightening—at last she could be useful too!—and scuffled off
through the kitchen to their bedroom at the back of the house.
As soon as she was gone, Stefan hurried to the door, then stopped just short and
slowly leaned in to the glass. The man outside seemed younger now than before, perhaps
in his mid-twenties. He was leaning on the porch railing; one by one, great drops of his
blood fell off his face and splashed onto the grey-blue slats below. His head was still
turned toward the light, his face twisted in silent agony, but his eyes were now sealed shut
with clotted blood.
For a long moment Stefan did not speak, did not even move, but instead just
continued to gaze though the window as though he were standing before a painting in a
museum. Finally Stefan’s lips parted, but words evaporated in his uncertain breath,
condensed in a faint cloud on the glass between. “H-Help Is On The Way,” he
pronounced at last, his voice buzzing against the glass like a trapped fly. “Help Is On The
Way. It Will Be All Right.”
15
At this, the young man began to lean back ever so slowly—clicked on, it seemed,
animated by his audience, like a funhouse robot or a streetmime. His red mouth widened,
as though he were about to laugh. “I’m s-scared,” he moaned. “I’m s-so . . . scared.”
Stefan paused, took a step back. For a moment he wondered whether this might
be some kind of trick after all. There seemed to be something suspiciously rehearsed in
the young man’s words, an underlying “purpose” one might detect in the pitch of a conman determined above all to be let inside the door. In light of this, the blood seemed an
even more impossible red, like the fake splattering they used in the theatre. And besides,
there had in fact been a story circulating about a murder that had been committed in
Bethany, the next town over. . . .
But then all at once Stefan frowned in self-reproach. What utter nonsense! He’d
just told the man that Help Was On The Way. If he were a criminal, he’d have fled at
once. Stefan went back to the window. Slowly the young man began to sink down,
down, until at last he was sitting on the porch in a smear of blood. He was scared—
obviously! He probably just wanted someone to hold his hand, his bloody hand.
“Is he still there?” Stefan’s mother whispered as she reappeared in the hallway
with his father, who surged past her looking large and angry, his bleary eyes trained
intently on the front door. He seemed ready to punish someone, anyone, and Stefan
instinctively stepped aside. His father glanced through the window, then quickly turned
away. “Was there an accident?” he said, heading off toward the living room to look
down the road.
Stefan’s mother made an answer as though he’d expected one—they didn’t know
what was happening; they just heard a knock, and there he was!—then gazed off toward
the living room, anxiously awaiting some new information, or else an order, some useful
act she could perform. When her husband didn’t respond, she turned to Stefan. They
stood there motionless, an oppressive silence between.
“What’s keeping them?!” Stefan said through his teeth, though it really hadn’t
been all that long. Wringing his hands, he retreated into the kitchen. His mother trailed
after him.
“You did the right thing, Stefan,” his mother said. “They’ll come and take care of
it. I don’t know what I’d have done if I’d been alone.”
Stefan glared at her for an instant, then slowly let his eyes fall to the red swirls
marbling the tiles below. Suddenly he felt queasy, light-headed, oddly wounded by that
plainly terrible fact—yes, in that case the young man surely would have died. But as
clear and awful as this fact seemed, it was really no more than a thin veil covering another
that was far more appalling; when all at once the veil dropped, vanished like a scrim,
Stefan recoiled in horror: Was he not dying even now? He spun around on his heels and
as in a dream, ghostlike, glided rapidly toward the door.
“Stefan! Stay back! Don’t open it!”
“I’m not!” Stefan said and pulled up just shy of the door, as though if he would
but touch the knob he would be instantly electrocuted. He peered out at the young man—
a boy actually, perhaps no more than sixteen. “It’s ok, it’s ok,” Stefan said through the
glass in a softer tone than before. “They’ll be here soon . . . Hang in there. You’ll be all
right.”
16
This time the boy didn’t answer, but just sat there on the porch in his steamy red
smears, sobbing and shivering.
Just then the police drove up. “They’re here,” Stefan announced with great relief.
“Oh, good!” his mother sang and rushed toward the living room. “Peter, the
police are here, you better—”
“He didn’t make the turn,” Stefan’s father broke in, then added somewhat angrily
under his breath, “They always have to drive so fast.” He steamed right past them both to
the kitchen and went out through the side door.
“Oh! You better go outside too, Peter-um, Stefan,” his mother said, gesturing to
him wildly. “They’ll probably want you for something—to make a statement or
something.”
Stefan drifted past her and out the side door. He joined his father under the pear
tree about ten feet from the porch and watched silently through the pulsing strobe of red
lights as the two policemen bustled about the injured boy. Gently they laid him flat on
the slats, then one pressed a cloth to his head, while the other began at once to clear the
porch of its decorations, grabbing the copper milk can and electric candle by the crown
and neck and setting them down over the side railing. As swiftly he seized the bench, but
struggled when what was resting on it—a large, densely woven wreath knotted at the top
by a huge red bow that read Mauer’s Farm in gold script—began to roll out from the side.
He glanced toward Stefan and his father, and at last the latter stepped forward in a rush,
received the bench and wreath as they were lowered from above, and set them gently on
the grass beneath the pear tree.
“Stefan! Get your coat on!”
Stefan looked behind him at his mother standing alone in the doorway, stared at
her uncertainly for an instant, as though through dim glass or a fog. She seemed miles
away, and very old and frail besides—someone’s grandmother shivering in an enormous
blue bathrobe. Stefan glanced down at his black t-shirt, his bare arms bathed in flashes of
red light. “I’m not cold,” he said curiously.
Just then a fire truck drove up noisily and was directed by the police down the
road to the scene of the accident. Stefan’s father watched them pass, set down the milk
can and candle with the other things, then turned and strode rapidly toward the house.
“I’m going to call the Knapps,” he announced. “They might see all the lights and start to
worry.”
“Good idea!” Stefan’s mother exclaimed and followed him into the house.
Stefan turned back to the porch. The policeman with the cloth was kneeling
closer to the boy, who was moaning faintly, trying to speak. “It’s all my fault,” he finally
managed to sob. “I was . . . I was going too fast, I—”
All at once he stopped, perhaps even passed out. Stefan shut his eyes,
embarrassed to be gazing upon the boy’s desperation—his futile hope that if he but told
the truth, took all the blame, then somehow everything that was happening now would
stop, and all would return to the way it was before, except that this time he would be more
careful, always and forever more careful, in every way imaginable. This plea, this
innocent attempt to invoke magical powers long disbelieved, made the boy seem even
younger than sixteen, a mere child of twelve, or eleven, ten . . .
“Better not touch those.”
17
Stefan turned around abruptly, then followed his father’s gaze down toward a pair
of bloodstained tissues lying at the foot of the milk can like orchids. “You never know
what kind of . . . diseases,” his father went on in the same low voice, then handed Stefan a
wool overcoat. Stefan took it as though it were some tool he didn’t know how to use.
“Put it on!” his mother called from the doorway. “You just had your bath. Your
pores are open.”
Stefan stared at the coat until at last he recognized it as the Christmas gift his
parents had given him only yesterday, then slowly put it on. Suddenly in its warmth he
felt very cold, or else felt only then how cold he had really been. It was probably nearly
freezing out, and he’d been standing there in just a t-shirt. All at once he felt ridiculous,
useless, and so headed back inside.
“Yes, come inside, it’s cold out there,” Stefan’s mother said. She followed him
anxiously into the kitchen and then into the hallway. Finally he stopped a good distance
from the front door, and so she stopped. “Dad called the Knapps so they wouldn’t worry.
I’ll call the Wands first thing tomorrow. It won’t take them long to hear about it—you
know how people talk! It’ll be all over town that we had some trouble here. Who knows
what everyone will think!—”
“He’s just a kid,” Stefan broke in abruptly, then trailed off.
“He is?” his mother said to fill the gap. “Well, you did the right thing, Peter-um,
Stefan. We couldn’t have let him in. We didn’t know who he was, he could have been
anybody—”
“I knew he wasn’t a criminal.”
Stefan’s mother looked stunned. “How?”
“Because I told him help was on the way and he didn’t run off,” Stefan said rather
sharply, then grimaced, recalling his own doubt.
Stefan’s mother searched his face, apparently a little unsure why her son was so
agitated. “Oh, you did?” she said, weaving this detail into the story she would tell
tomorrow. “That was a good idea—very clever.”
The side door creaked open, and Stefan’s father quietly joined them in the
hallway, his eyes on the floor; perhaps he too had begun to feel a little useless outside.
For a moment the three of them just stood there frozen in an awkward silence, which as
always Stefan’s mother felt compelled to break. “What’s happening?” she said to her
husband. “Did they ask you for a statement?”
Stefan’s father stared past her, rubbed his elbow. Just then there was a knock at
the front door, and he lunged forward to open it. A policeman poked his head through the
crack and asked politely if they might use a blanket.
Stefan’s father nodded, shut the door. “A blanket, they need a blanket,” he said,
charging back down the hallway.
Stefan’s mother bit her fist. “Oh, God!” she said, following her husband. “We
don’t have a blanket!”
“You must have a blanket!” Stefan muttered under his breath, and then he too
followed. Together they paraded through the kitchen to the closet near the bathroom.
Stefan’s father threw open the door, and all three Mauers stared dumbly at the six shelves
crammed with fat, flowered blankets and thick stacks of colorful towels.
“We don’t have any blankets!” Stefan’s mother said again.
18
Stefan’s mouth fell open. He turned to his father; apparently he agreed there were
no blankets in this closet. Stefan tore himself away and reeled back to the hallway. He
looked at the door; they were out there, waiting for their blanket: What’s taking those
people so long? Filled with shame, Stefan thought of offering the police his new
overcoat; he even started to take the awful thing off his back, and for an instant actually
saw himself opening the front door and stepping out onto the porch, kneeling next to the
boy and gently swaddling him in the coat, brushing his matted hair from his eyes. Shhh.
Lie still. I’m here. It’ll be all right . . .
But then all at once Stefan woke from his reverie and shook his head miserably.
No, he couldn’t do it, couldn’t bear to make it all so clear—spelling out his parents’
selfishness in a young boy’s blood! He was embarrassed for them, and in truth even a
little afraid of how they would react; for when they found out what he’d done, they would
no doubt recoil from their exposed shame and go on the defensive right then and there,
even while the boy still writhed right outside their door. How could he do such a stupid
thing? they’d shout at him. Oh, he always had to be so dramatic. Of course they weren’t
going to give them one of their “good” blankets, they weren’t expected to; no one would
do such a thing. “Well, now you don’t have an overcoat,” his father would say in disgust
to end the discussion, as though Stefan couldn’t possibly have realized that that would be
the result of his rash act.
So Stefan put his coat back on. No doubt the policeman would have been
surprised and embarrassed by the gesture; he’d have probably just handed the coat back:
Any old blanket would do fine. Stefan shivered, wrapped his arms around his stomach.
He felt trapped, frozen to his spot; meanwhile, ten feet away a boy was going into shock.
It was awful! Oh, if only this had happened outside his front door, it would all be so
different. . . .
Stefan’s parents stepped briskly into the hallway. “We might have something
upstairs,” his mother said calmly, like a store clerk. Stefan paused a moment, then
followed them up; this time he would grab the first thing he saw and run like a thief no
matter what they said. At the top of the stairs his father and mother stood gazing into
another closet stuffed with blankets. Stefan was about to push between them when
Stefan’s father selected a thin, pale blue blanket from the top left shelf. “Good, that one,”
Stefan’s mother said.
“I’ll take it down!” Stefan said, seizing the blanket. He ran downstairs, down the
hallway, and out the side door, but then slowed to a stop at the pear tree. The paramedics
had arrived and were scrambling to get their equipment out of the ambulance. One of
them was spreading a sheet of yellow canvas on top of the boy to keep him warm. Stefan
stood there for a moment in awe of those who knew precisely what to do to save lives.
He felt useless again, his parents’ threadbare blanket dangling from his hand. But at last
he shook himself free and timidly approached the porch.
“You still need this?” he said. The policeman who before had been pressing a
cloth to the boy’s head looked at Stefan as though he were standing in some distant
world. He took the blanket without saying a word and laid it down on top of the boy,
whose legs at once began to quiver. He was unconscious, in shock; a faint cloud of steam
rose steadily out of his open mouth, until the paramedics snuffed it with an oxygen mask.
19
Stefan turned away, squinted up at the crisp winter moon glaring down through
the spiky black shoots of the pear tree. He thought of his grandmother who had died in
this very house, died in the very bed in which she was born, and how one misty night just
before she was buried he had come out here to the yard and all at once stood deathly still,
knowing as sure as he lived that if he were ever to see her spirit, taking one last look at
the farm that had been as flesh and blood to her, one last look before it was swelled and
lacquered into The Country Inn, The House By The Side Of The Road, it would happen
right then. He’d peered bravely into the mist swathing the edges of the rotting barn and
sheds, alert to any shapes or shadows dancing at the corners of his eyes, ready to whirl
and see her standing there as plain as day, smiling, child-like, as though playing a game
she’d let him win. But of course nothing had happened, and he’d shrugged and gone
inside; it had been a ridiculous notion, but at times later he suspected he just hadn’t been
patient enough, that he just hadn’t believed . . .
Stefan felt the same way now. He wondered whether the boy would die there on
their front porch, or whether he might already be dead and gazing down at them all, as
many people who had come close to dying later claimed to have done. Stefan glanced
suddenly to his left, to the empty swing dangling on rusty chains from the apple tree, then
straight ahead to the dead fields beyond, where blades of red light fanned wildly outward
in a wide arc to the invisible horizon, as though on a desperate search for the boy’s
confused and drifting soul, hoping with their garish touch to sweep it back into this safe
world where presumably it still belonged. Stefan followed the sweep of every blade, his
heart skipping at the sudden gleam of a stone or a darting rabbit, then peered hard
between the blades, until instead of a flurry of motion he saw only a vast stillness, a taut
red web with a black cloud looming at the center, formless, empty—if that was where the
boy’s soul had fallen, who dared follow?
Stefan sighed and turned back to the porch. The paramedics picked up the boy on
their stretcher and quickly carried him down the steps of the porch. The policeman to
whom Stefan had given the blanket stood nearby, and together they watched the
paramedics load the boy into their ambulance. “Will he . . .” Stefan began, then faltered.
“Do you think he’ll be all right?”
The policeman sighed. “I don’t know,” he said, then added more reassuringly,
“Oh, I bet he will. He lost a lot of blood, but he should be okay.”
Stefan stared hard at the man. Unlike a lot of cops Stefan had met, this one seemed
straightforward and sincere, even kind in a neighborly way—why, then, was it impossible
to believe him? The policeman turned away and went back to the porch, where his partner
had already begun wiping bloodstains off the railing with his handkerchief. Stefan’s father
returned and stood next to his son in silence. Finally one of the policemen looked up at
them. “You know, if we could get a bucket of water on this . . .” he said politely. “I mean,
you should probably get this off before it dries.”
“Yeah, yeah, sure,” Stefan’s father said and charged off as before. This time,
however, he was back in no time with not only a bucket but an old broom as well. The
policemen stepped aside as Stefan’s father carefully poured out the soapy water over the
bloodiest areas. The porch sizzled, and wispy clouds of steam rose up from the slats.
The policemen went back to work with their cloths, while Stefan’s father grabbed the
broom and, in a series of quick hard strokes, scrubbed up a milky red froth.
20
Stefan gasped and let his head drop to his chest, then gently pressed his eyelids
shut with his thumb and forefinger. He felt drained and strangely detached, as though he
were standing in a fog. He had an intense desire to run headlong into the field, or to
anywhere, yet at the same time he felt utterly inert, as rooted to the spot as the pear tree or
the house itself. Then he heard another splash, more scrubbing, and Stefan turned on his
heel and hurried into the house. Once more his mother was standing just inside the door
to greet him. “What’s happening?” she asked, still breathless.
Stefan slowly took off his overcoat and placed it in its box. “They took him
away,” he said, then added after a pause, “The police say he’ll be all right.”
“Oh, good,” Stefan’s mother said, clasping her knotted hands to her chest
“But I don’t believe them,” Stefan cut in. “I think he’s dead.”
“No, Stefan . . .” Stefan’s mother turned away, smoothed her robe. “Oh, the poor
boy,” she said, blandly grave. “Well, it’s in the Lord’s hands now.”
Stefan raised his eyes and glared at his mother, his lips parting, poised to rebuke
or to smile. Surely there was no Lord here, no room for Saviors in this Country Inn. . . .
The poor child, the star eclipsed after just one day, the Word silenced before it can be
spoken, the Play closed down before it even opens. The spotlight flickers and goes out;
the stage is broken down in pieces and sold for scrap. Angels curse their luck and scour
the want-ads. The Author is disappointed, but philosophical; even had the Play gone on
and on, its praises sung on every continent, it would only rarely have been understood and
would have made no real impact on the world, would have changed none of the corrupt
institutions it held up for scorn. No, it’s much easier this way. The shepherds follow
their usual routine, do their jobs as they’re supposed to; the astrologers stay home, content
to gaze only at their own skies. Herod rests easy, even shrewdly turns the star’s death to
his political advantage, making a great show of his benevolence by calling off the
massacre. The blind remain in the dark, the dumb keep quiet, and except for the lucky
ones hoarding their scraps of bread and fish, the multitudes go hungry. The knock at
midnight goes unanswered, and the Prodigal Son is turned away. There is no hope of a
revolution to be crushed, no Passion, no pain, and no butterfly dream of salvation.
Needless to say, the dead stay dead. No, there was no use bothering with all that. The
Play’s aborted run makes only one real difference, and it’s strictly personal: now there’s
a little less to remember, a little less to desire, one less story to make life seem more real.
“Well, you did the right thing, Peter-Mary-um, Stefan. It’s very dangerous to let
people in when you don’t know them. They could be anybody. Did I mention there was
a murder nearby? In Bethany—that’s just down the road! . . .”
Stefan turned away and fled to the living room, but his mother scurried after him.
Beneath all her banalities his mother sounded oddly angry, as though she were berating
him for something, demanding an apology for having wounded her in some way. And it
wasn’t fair—it was the other way around! He tried to take refuge in whatever he could—
surveying the Christmas tree ornaments, peering into the proscenium of the crèche,
poking at the molten coals in the fireplace. But these evasions were simply absorbed into
the relentless rush of words spilling out of her.
“. . . Wasn’t it a nice tree? I noticed you hung Grandma’s old decorations. I left
them for you, because I know how much you like them. Oh, we were so worried about
Grandma when she lived here. Imagine! All by herself! I don’t know what I would’ve
21
done if I had been alone. You did the right thing, Stefan. Oh, did you see? Look on the
mantle. See the Wise Men? Remember how you used to move them a step every day
until the Epiphany? It was so cute, you used to measure it out first. Oh, might as well let
the fire go out, honey. We’re going to bed soon. I’m tired, how about you? . . .”
Stefan spun away into the library, and he might have kept going on and on
through the whole house, into the bathroom for another long bath if necessary, except that
at the threshold of the front hallway he heard that awful scrubbing going on just outside.
Stefan stopped in his tracks. Tomorrow all traces of the boy would be gone.
“. . . Is Dad still outside? What are they doing out there? Did they ask you for a
statement?. Oh, that’s right, it’s different where you are. I’ll bet things like this happen
all the time. We don’t expect all this excitement here. . .”
And what remained? In a kind of desperation Stefan let his eyes glide over the
spines of the books no one read and the keys of the piano no one played; over cabinets
crammed with the fat scrapbooks that proved what a happy life the Mauers all had; and
over the shelves of family photos, over the whole section of wall devoted to his awards
and degrees, a kind of apology for the fact that he had produced no progeny, a way of
filling in what they all perceived as an embarrassing absence in his life, and thus in their
lives too. His mother had left some space, but there would be little else to add from here
on. Perhaps if the boy outside had survived he would have written the Mauers a thankyou note they could frame and display here like a trophy: The Boy Whose Life Stefan
Saved.
“. . . Well, we’ll certainly hear about this tomorrow. It’ll be all over town. You
know how people talk. I know the Knapps will want to hear every little thing. Oh, I have
your awards up—did you see? What a story! Now this would be something to write
about!”
Stefan grimaced, locked his hands against his abdomen. How had he ever thought
he could write even a single word?
“You can’t help it,” he muttered to himself. “You’re just miserable. I can’t do
anything to help you.”
His mother recoiled. “Stefan!”
Stefan turned and faced her. Her eyes were red and pleading, her hands twisted in
the same knot as his.
“We did it,” Stefan said in a kind of trance, his eyes fixed on those hands. “We
killed him.”
“We what? No!”
Stefan nodded, almost elated. “We’re monstrous!”
“Stefan, what are you saying?!”
Stefan’s mother was terrified, right at the very edge of tears. “Shh. It’s over now,
it’s all right,” Stefan said, embracing her. “I’m here, I’m not going anywhere, not really.”
Stefan gave a short laugh. “I can’t!”
“I don’t understand,” his mother said. “What did you mean by that?”
“Never mind. It doesn’t matter,” Stefan said, releasing her, then looked down at
the desk, on which were the scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. His mother had assigned
him the task of assembling it a couple of days ago, had seized his arm and led him into
this room as though a marvelous surprise awaited him there. “Remember how good you
22
were at these?” she’d asked, sitting him down at the desk. She’d opened the box, set the
lid up as his model, and then had run off to gather a few of his nephews and nieces to
pose with him over the puzzle in a photograph: Uncle Stefan the Puzzle King Shows
How!
“I’m sorry. Here, sit here with me. Help me finish,” Stefan said gently, sitting
down at the desk and lowering his head as though dropping away into deep meditation.
Yes, this was the right thing to do; at last she’d have the proof she so urgently needed that
she was right, that nothing bad had happened, not now, not ever.
Stefan stared intently at the lid, the picture that had been carved up into a
thousand pieces—a man and his three sons trudging across the snow at dusk, dragging
behind them a felled tree on a sled. “Their prisoner,” Stephanie had laughed—poor
Stephanie! He’d told her the secret: Forget the picture. Sift through all the pieces
gently—like it’s a prospector’s pan, or maybe a box of wishes, or the place where
children are waiting to be born!—until one of them appears that seems to say, at times in
a shout but usually in the faintest whisper, “It’s me.” Then just let it guide you to its
place—don’t fight it. You know where it goes.
And thus had the four bright red human forms materialized in jagged little islands,
along with their massive farmhouse in the distance, their barns, their cars and trucks.
They made their way in silence; it wasn’t much fun, it was a job, a tradition, something to
photograph. And of course, as a result they’d never really get there. Stefan heard
nothing; outside they were done with their scrubbing, and his mother had gone. No, he
was no better, no worse; he had merely chosen a different way to express his shame. He
was leaving tomorrow; it would be better then, for a time. Ah, but the poor boy outside—
where was he now? Stefan’s eyes welled over with a clear film—no matter, he wouldn’t
need them. He sifted through the remaining pieces, flicked the dust from his fingers, and
set to work. Nothing was left to fit together but the spaces all around, the parts that were
impossible to see in fragments: the dense cloud of woods that filigreed into the violet
haze of mountain, and then the ashy fields of snow smothering the sun, and last the
spreading, milk-blood sky.
23
In the Basement of the Psychoanalysis Museum
I am writing this as a public service to all those who somehow don’t feel fully
alive unless they are seeking out those remote corners of every city in which some
disturbed individual, or worse some group of them, has set up a unique exhibition of the
grotesque. These exhibitions are free of charge and enjoy a cult following; they are the
city’s decadent little secrets, passed along in slurred whispers at 3 a.m. in cloudy cafes.
Those of you who have seen the razor sharp teeth of the thousand or so discarded dolls
crammed into “Limbos”; the dirty bones and vials of relics apparently exploded into orbit
around the shrunken brown head of “St. Infantasy, Martyr”; or the deathpale worms
poking their heads out of the black soil of “The Earth Room,” know the jarring pleasure
each affords. Granted, most of these exhibits are in themselves quite harmless, except in
that they are usually (but now always) hidden in some dark, dingy alley in the most
desperate sections of the city where vagrants and criminals abound.
But really now, truly listen: There is one exhibit you must make certain to avoid
no matter how the sound of it may intrigue you; in fact, I realize the danger of my even
bringing the Basement of the Psychoanalysis Museum to the public’s attention. For this
reason, no doubt it’s fortunate I cannot direct anyone to its precise location, though on the
other hand if I knew where it was I wouldn’t now be writing; I’d have had the authorities
close it down at once. But this is all beside the point, since I’m quite sure the monstrous
proprietors of this museum move their nasty little chambers all around. Sometimes as
I’m walking alone down some street, any street really, I’ll see something – a dead animal,
say, or a gushing hydrant, or twin beds – which brings it all back, and I know it’s nearby,
pulsing in its lurid light, just underneath. Do I then investigate, poke around the ashes of
the neighborhood for shreds of clues, ask coded questions of passersby? Not on your life!
I run and hide, I flee at once to my room and pull the shades, lest somehow once more
that hideous exhibit find me, and before I know it I find myself wandering lost and
terrified through its dim, distorted corridors. Oh, you may laugh at this, say I’m being
extreme, and I am, I know I am, but that’s just it – I wasn’t so before. Oh, beware thrill
seekers! The Basement of the Psychoanalysis Museum is not worth the risk. My
24
experience there was a nightmare from which I am only just now beginning to wake. And
while it is true that everyone’s experience there would differ widely – such is its genius,
as I will try to explain – I’m not certain that anyone, anyone at all mind you, emerges
from it unscathed.
True, I went there at what was for me the worst possible time. I was not well; I
was losing weight, not sleeping, talking to walls; in short, for the first time in my entire
life I found myself utterly alone. For seven years my wife Elizabeth and I had enjoyed
what many who appreciated our obvious compatibility had called a fantasy marriage—but
they didn’t know the half of it. Who indeed could even have imagined, much less
penetrated, the dense fabric of our private, dreamy life together? Between us we
fashioned a whole world, a whole language, created and re-created it daily. We animated
everything around us, not just our childhood dolls or toys or every part of our bodies, as
all lovers do to some extent, but even the most insignificant, most in-animate things, and
constantly so, relentlessly. Knives, scissors, vacuums, ice scrapers – everything we
touched had a soul and sang along with us, celebrating our joy at “passing together
through this vale of tears we call life,” as the Justice of the Peace, prophetic old hag, had
read at our elopement. When a pen came up missing, we turned the place inside out to
find it, listening all the while for its tinny shriek: Help! I’m over here! And we’d say
“Where? Where? Tell us where,” and after a long pause it would answer with a sob, I
don’t know. It was really terrifying sometimes; for all we knew our beloved object was
lying in a gutter somewhere miles away, half-buried in slush, freezing to death, maybe
crushed! Sometimes we’d find it months later in some forgotten corner of the closet,
dusty and worn but alive—and then, what a celebration we’d have! We’d kiss it, use it to
draw countless hearts and exclamation points, and store it from then on in a red velvet
box with the string of pearls. Some perceptive individuals, perhaps sensing this invisible
world resounding just beneath the surface of our public lives, used to say what wonderful
parents we’d make someday, but we were in no hurry to prove them right. What need had
we for children when as it was our apartment rang with little voices, all clamoring for our
attention, and getting it too, every time without fail?
But then, but then – all at once the joyful singing stopped. Well, not all at once;
during the usual period of lies and subterfuge they sang on tape, or were merely
ventriloquized. But before that, before I actually discovered my wife had forsaken our
world for another, she showed not one sign of dissatisfaction, none at all, nothing of
significance anyway. You may believe this or not, I don’t care. At first I was shocked to
realize that our mutual friends were avoiding me, but now I’ve learned well that the world
despises a loser, no matter how blameless – or especially if he is blameless (such people
do exist you know). At one point it was of vital importance to me that Elizabeth had
agreed (and, incidentally, without coercion) to sign a written statement that it was all her
fault, that I had done absolutely nothing wrong. Thankfully, we never drew up such a
document – imagine having that around!—but none of that matters to me now. I only
mention it to describe how my state of mind may have contributed to my dreadful
experience in the Basement of the Psychoanalysis Museum – not that this fact absolves its
proprietors. No, not in the slightest.
It all began on the first of November, exactly one month to the day after my wife
had departed our world. I remember it was a terribly dense, gray Saturday morning, the
25
kind that convinces you at once that you will never be resurrected. I cowered in bed far
longer than usual, occasionally glancing up at the brass hook poking out of my ceiling,
and supposing for the hundredth time that it was strong enough to suspend the heaviest
houseplant, but probably not a body. As usual this train of thought led me to the
humbling fact that I could not in any case tie even the simplest good knot. It would have
to be a “good” one, I figured, one you had to master, one sanctioned by the Boy Scouts of
America or taught on the docks by some old salt (“Aye, there you go, Laddie, a
‘cuckold’s neck’ that is”); but the former I had never joined, and the latter I’d only read
about, having lived my early years in the heart of the country, hopelessly landlocked. On
the other hand, research, premeditation (consulting The Book of Knots, say) was out of the
question, and as this was my usual exit from such semi-dark musings, at last I just
groaned and rolled myself out of bed to make coffee.
It was deathly quiet in the kitchen. The spoons, the mugs, were lifeless in my
hands, merely functional, corpses of metal and porcelain. How they used to dance
through the air to my beloved just waking to our weekend! I gave a couple of short sobs,
then winced at the sound; I hated when they bubbled to the surface like that, but even
more so this time, because the very moment they spilled down my chin and onto the
counter, the man next door erupted in one of his uncontrollable fits of shrieking laughter.
Victor had Tourette’s or something and so almost never went out, cowed, I assume, by
thirty-odd years of ridicule. As such he was even more alone in the world than I was, but
the few times I’d seen and spoken to him, even hoping to befriend him, he’d shrugged me
off, pretending he hadn’t heart. Of course, he couldn’t help himself, he wasn’t laughing
at me; he even kept the television on loud to muffle his outbursts (no doubt previous
tenants had complained), or else to make me think he was just entertained himself like
anyone else. Still, it was naturally disturbing to notice how often his funhouse cackling
coincided with my worst moments; perhaps my miserable little cries dribbling through
the thin walls made him nervous, or even compassionate, and this was his only way of
showing it.
But on that awful, gray morning, it was only too obvious that Victor was the
whole world, and that in its eyes I was a terrific fool. I sobbed some more, louder this
time, and Victor laughed again. “Stop it!” I cried finally, but the world found this
particularly hilarious; its triumph sent me reeling across the room as far from the wall as
possible. I curled up in a ball and covered my ears with my palms, but the cackles bled
through the cracks in my fingers. I tried desperately to think of something else, anything
else, and that’s when I heard them, those voices in the distance, drawing nearer, a chorus
of boys singing over and over: Kyri-e Eleison, Kyri-e Eleison, Kyri-e Eleison…
Then I saw them, emerging in hazy black and white as in an old film, black-robed
boys in procession along a sandy strand, the leader holding aloft a giant spear of a
crucifix, the last (and smallest) swinging a censer like a bell. The scene was familiar, but
I couldn’t identify it, so I kept replaying it over and over, rewinding the film, examining it
for clues, expecting that at any moment the boys would wander into the tiny dim room in
my mind where their names or their purpose were uselessly stored. A light would flash,
no doubt a disappointingly faint one, a mere flicker, but you know how it is, I had to have
it anyway. Sometimes I felt them eerily close, just on the other side of the wall from full
recognition, but no matter how carefully I led them on they always took the wrong turn.
26
At last I sensed they’d wandered too far and were hopelessly lost, and so abandoned the
search. But it had served its purpose; I had calmed, and so had Victor.
I got up and warmed my coffee, smoked a cigarette. Outside a cold rain was
spitting down from the sky, dragging the last of the autumn to the dirty pavement,
mercenaries on a mop-up which I knew would last the rest of the day and deep into the
night. I knew for certain now that it was the day I’d dreaded for some time, the day I
wouldn’t know how to survive. I had tried to prepare for it, or else stave it off, by
cultivating a desperate variety of interests. I wrote letters, especially to people I hadn’t
seen for years. I kept a journal of my dreams (frightful things, mostly about intruders
ransacking my home, or lurking in closets). I set up a darkroom, watched my diet, read
German fairy tales, played myself in chess, studied basic alchemy, plumbing, phrenology.
They seemed sturdy enough nets while I was weaving them, but of course on this heaviest
of all days, none of them were of the slightest use. I plummeted through each of them as
through cobwebs and by afternoon hit rock bottom with a terrific thud. As a last resort I
switched on the television and made a quick circuit of the channels, pausing only at a
panel discussion of the abortion issue, which started out quite civilized but of course
rapidly degenerated into a vicious scream session, one side hurling ‘piles and piles of
dead babies,” and the other slinging “rusty, bloody coat hangers in back alleys.”
It was awful. I paced up and down my apartment, smoking, wringing my hands,
then all at once stopped in a kind of paralysis, a quiet terror. For months I’d been teasing
myself about that brass hook above my bed, and although I wasn’t really considering
suicide right then either, suddenly I understood for the first time in my life how it
happened. For a while you had these moments in which you felt horribly trapped,
immobile, suffocating—quite a lot of them at first and then perhaps less frequently but
more and more intensely—until one day you just couldn’t wriggle free, you didn’t even
try. You were already dead, so the last act itself was just one minor detail to take care of,
like locking the door before you went out.
Naturally I was alarmed at this revelation and began to scramble for alternatives. I
grabbed my coat and rushed out the front door, but was blown back by all that cold rain;
and besides, where could I possibly go that my despair wouldn’t follow, squat on my
shoulders? At a bar perhaps my demon would get distracted and mingle with the other
depressed souls, but there was no guarantee of that, and my misery wanted no company.
Back inside, I figured I should call someone and snatched up the phone, but the dial tone
stretched out like a long black line separating me from the world. The only person in
town whom I knew for certain would not make a withering excuse was M., the brother of
a friend of mine who lived upstate. But M. was in severe depression himself. At the age
of thirty he’d suddenly found himself caught in the web of a number of obsessive
compulsions, sexual in nature and adolescent in origin, which prevented him from
becoming the productive member of society his generally friendly manner and high test
scores had always presumed. After losing himself (and the greater part of his inheritance)
in a few religious cults, he had finally surrendered to the urging of concerned friends and
relatives and sequestered himself in the gentle, careful environs of Weber Sanitarium.
What’s more, though I had seen quite a lot of M. the year or so he’d lived here, I hadn’t
yet told him of my situation. I didn’t want to upset him, I’d told myself, since it seemed
likely that M. in his extreme, childish way had considered my wife and me the most
27
stable couple in the world, perhaps even substitute parents for the ones he’d long ago lost
to divorce, and that news of our split might make him reason in despair that if we hadn’t
made it, then it was hopeless for him.
But this miserable afternoon I couldn’t help but admit there was more to my not
telling him than some conveniently benevolent desire to protect him from the harsh
realities of the world. I’d always used to try to encourage him by saying that he was not
so very different from a lot of people, that in fact if I myself were to lose the structure my
wife supplied me I’d no doubt soon join him there on the borderline. Of course, this was
rather easy encouragement, perhaps even somewhat disingenuous, since at the time I
never dreamed such a loss was possible. How could I face him now that it was so, now
that the distinction between us was rapidly blurring? True, I had not as yet developed the
disabling compulsions he had, but I didn’t doubt that I was a high risk for one or two.
Actually now I wish I had called M., since he has been the only one who has truly
understood and sympathized with my experience in the Basement of the Psychoanalysis
Museum. But at the time I could only believe it was better to keep my distance from M.
for a while, lest before we knew it we’d begin to feed and shape each other’s manias.
Of course, I considered calling M.’s brother, D., who was after all like a brother to
me too, or any of my other old friends scattered across the country; but although they all
had on numerous occasions made it clear to me that I should not hesitate to call at
precisely times such as this, I didn’t feel I could stand interjecting my misery into their
happy Saturdays. I thought too of calling my real brother or else my sister, but as our
parents had spent a great deal of their marriage ignoring their problems, we were rather
uncomfortable talking to one another about ours. I’d invariably allow myself to become
terse when they couldn’t give me what I wanted, even angry. Besides, I’d come to
despise that moment at the close of any telephone call when the tiny voice at the other
end clicked away into the unreachable past, the dead receiver echoed in its cradle, and
once more I was enveloped in dark, oppressive silence.
In short, I was exhausted, drained from the intense effort I was putting into every
single day, every hour. Now I wanted more than anything for something to come to me,
for someone to tell me what to do. For a while I even convinced myself that precisely
that would happen, that at any moment I’d hear a ring or else a knock at my door, simply
because I so wished it. I sat down in the chair and waited, and waited; the caller, the
visitor, was just now dialing, was walking up the steps, and here they were…”Now,” I
said aloud, “N-N-Now!”
I played this game for the better part of an hour, each time actually picturing the
individual who was coming to rescue me from these depths, often someone I’d never seen
before, offering me a whole new world to explore, a new life. The postman with his bag
of special deliveries; the political canvasser; the woman upstairs with her broken
thermostat; the wrong number who by total chance had lived across the street from me
that summer seven years ago, and who had watched with great interest from her attic
room window as I sat on the porch steps piecing together “that poor broken woman with
the dark circles” (Elizabeth! So it wasn’t a dream then? It did happen the way I
remembered it!). None of them came when called, but that hardly discouraged me; in
fact, it wasn’t long before I’d systematized the game. Once I’d conceived my savior, I
gave him or her precisely ten minutes to make themselves known, and while the clock
28
ticked down to that moment of transformation, I imagined exactly what I’d say, and what
they’d say, and what future meetings would hold, pleasant or not. Every now and then
the picture would get hazy, or else simply complete, and there was nothing to do but wait
out the last fifty seconds or so; and then suddenly Victor would let loose a shriek, and
into the breach would wander that procession of choirboys with their dreamy chant. Each
time I repeated in vain my previous attempts at identifying the boys, if only to dismiss
them more quickly – I didn’t want them blocking the way when my visitor arrived – but
then all at once they themselves tripped the wire, and all was light and revelation.
They were from a film after all, The Lord of the Flies, which I’d seen a portion of
many months before on one of those long nights my wife’s absences had begun to seem
suspicious. The book I’d read in early adolescence, just after my pious phase during
which I was secretly preparing myself for the priesthood—kneeling in that cavernous
church in the dim blue dawn, even on Saturdays, alone except for the dozen or so old,
worn sufferers and penitents scattered in the shadows; clutching my red missal and
fingering my beads, clenching my teeth and thinking hard to myself as the bell was
ringing, “There it is, right there, the Body and Blood!” Perhaps the book put an end to
that era, scared me off with all that “savagery within.” Remember that awful business?
Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood! Poor Piggy, he didn’t have a chance. No,
it was better not to be thrilled with blood, but then what else was there, I wondered way
back then and often since, except the bland world that seemed so drained of it?
Anyway, although recognizing the source of the procession hardly rescued me
from my present despair, for me there’s always something somewhat satisfying, if not
sedative, about making pieces fit, any pieces. Suddenly I felt extremely tired and without
a single other thought about my mystery callers or visitors, I dropped off into a dead sleep
right there in the chair.
Now, I’m not at all fond of afternoon naps; for me they’re always fitful and
usually haunted by the most disturbing dreams. I hate the feeling of waking in total
darkness, terribly disoriented and often twice as weary as I was before. This is especially
so if the nap is suddenly interrupted as it was that day by the ringing phone. I scrambled,
or rather was lifted, out of my bed (at some point I must have drifted there from the chair
like a ghost), not at all aware of who I was or where, thinking only “Disaster” and then
“Catastrophe” and then “What what what?!” until finally I answered the phone and heard
the soft, gentle voice of my wife Elizabeth at the other end.
She wanted to see me right away; she had something important to tell me, or to
show me, something she knew I’d like. I paused, allowing that warm sound to fill my
chest cavity, the old familiar tone. Of course, I breathed at last, of course I’d meet her
wherever she liked. She gave me an address, then I hung up the phone, and instead of the
usual awful silence I heard a gentle buzzing, a rising murmur, throughout my apartment.
It’s over, I thought; she’s coming back! And the place erupted in cheers.
We’re back! We’re alive! they shouted, the potholders and the pillows, the
envelopes and erasers. I spread my arms wide as though to embrace them all. I put on
my coat and was just about to leave when I was called back by the toaster, who unlike
other toasters was sort of plump and slow, and not really all that good at toasting, but
lovable in his simple way. “What is it?” I said, but he’d forgotten, and everyone laughed,
and I smiled and took a few steps toward the door, and then oh yeah: Go get ‘em, Cal!
29
Moved, I tapped him on his broad shoulder, said I couldn’t have done it without him, and
get ready to toast his brains out. Everyone laughed again and cheered. I waved and
hurried out the door.
I was delirious, I couldn’t believe what was happening. I barely remember riding
the train downtown. Before I knew it I was looking up and down Brian Street for “a dark
alley that veined in from the right side.”
You should know right away that the Basement of the Psychoanalysis Museum
was not really a basement at all; that is, there were no upper floors to the museum. Oh,
there were stairs all right, hundreds of them, but the museum itself was all basement. Do
you follow me? I don’t suppose you do. I scarcely understand the place, though I spent
hours there – the most terrifying hours of my life. It all began happily enough. My wife
and I had always enjoyed museums, especially those secret exhibitions I mentioned
earlier, and we were elated to have stumbled upon this one, happy to stroll into it arm in
arm, celebrating our reunion. Oh, there was no need to say anything, no need to make it
official with an apology; my Elizabeth was back, and all was forgiven.
We were greeted in pitch darkness by a tall, thin woman in a stiff, midnight blue
suit – our guide whether we wanted one or not, a performance artist, I imagined; in fact, a
faint white and bluish light shone down on her, and on my wife and me as well, so that it
seemed as though we were all standing on a stage. Her black hair was tied back in a tight
bun, so that she was mostly a face, a glossy blue mask with intense dark eyes and high
sharp cheekbones. She stood very rigidly erect and spoke in a very formal if soft tone,
more like a scientist or a doctor than a tour guide. Understandably overwhelmed by the
strangeness of the scene, I didn’t catch what she said at first, then gathered she’d already
begun explaining the first exhibit.
“…So that at times one is prevented from performing the simplest acts,” she
concluded matter-of-factly and gestured with her palm to our right. The room was pitch
black, but at her sign there was a faint hum of electricity, and a hazy cone of eerie reddish
and bluish lights shone down from somewhere. There seemed nothing there at first, but
soon our eyes adjusted, and we could see certain familiar objects slowly materializing, as
through a purple gauze. It was a bathroom, or a portion of one – a narrow, milkwhite sink
with an unusually complex network of silver pipes curling beneath like thick vines to a
chessboard tile floor, and a small, cracked mirror hanging slightly askew just above. The
faucet was on full, and I could faintly hear and see a steady stream of white water; in fact,
the more I watched, the more I felt I could feel the water, flowing warm and soft over my
hands. This was my first indication of the unique powers of the Basement of the
Psychoanalysis Museum, but I barely had time to acknowledge what was happening
before the first performance/exhibit began.
A man, more haze than flesh, emerged out of the darkness and approached the
sink. Weary from labor, he obviously wanted to wash his hands, which were quite large
(and rough, I imagined). However, just as he was about to place his hands in the soothing
stream, he saw something in it, some reddish white mass spinning slowly around and
around as though on a spit. He stood back aghast, transfixed. After a few moments he
considered trying again, but every time he made the slightest motion towards the sink, the
mass (a hologram, I believe) seemed to intensify, becoming redder and if possible more
animal than before, its turning ribs more distinct. Then a woman remarkably similar in
30
looks and bearing to our tour guide approached from behind, clearly interested in using
the sink as well. She waited behind the man for a moment, never letting on she was
there, but then finally, seeing the man was having such a hard time, she grew impatient
and disgusted and turned away into the darkness. The man stood there frozen,
mesmerized, no longer even trying to wash. And so the first performance ended,
evaporated, faded to black.
The spell broken, my mouth fell open. I was stunned, impressed. I glanced at my
wife, who was grinning broadly. She must have felt it too, the strange power of the
performance, which made us feel wholly sympathetic with the man, not in the way people
normally toss out the word, but in its strictest sense; we were completely as one with him
in his plight, our consciousnesses merged, his terror ours. Who was this actor? I thought,
I must get his name. Then the tour guide extended her palm again indicating the way to
the next exhibit, which I could just barely see hovering like a patch of fog in the far
corner. We slowly made our way over, and out of the white mist emerged a little grove of
seven tall poles, on each of which was impaled a full set of teeth.
“Sometimes when people are under great stress their teeth fall out,” our guide
explained with jarring disinterest. We stood there looking at the display, waiting, but this
time no actors emerged into the spotlight. Soon it was clear that there wouldn’t be any
performance this time, and my wife and I turned to one another and smiled. Well, it was
clever and interesting, we were thinking, more of what one would expect from a place
like this—but what a letdown after the previous exhibit! Perhaps a little too quickly we
turned and nodded to our guide to show we were ready to move on. For an instant I
thought I saw her come out of her character when the faintest trace of a smile played at
the edge of her lips – evidently she too knew it was a weak exhibit – but at once she
recovered her professional sheen, turned silently on her heel, and let us further on into the
darkness.
Now, it’s quite possible that some of you have perceived the trap I was falling into
at precisely this moment. Lulled to sleep, my defenses down, I must have seemed easy
prey to the museum’s depraved proprietors. I should have suspected something the
moment I noticed how long the walk to the next exhibit was taking, as well as how
increasingly dark it was getting all around us. But instead I did precisely as they’d no
doubt designed; I turned inward and thought about the previous exhibits, especially the
latter, which in my mind at least had sparked an unfortunate connection.
When I first met Elizabeth seven years ago at the Architecture Institute, she was in
a deplorable state. An abusive father and several neurotic lovers had led her at twentytwo right to the brink of debilitating despair. She could barely sleep, much less assume a
passable role in the waking world, which in general is quick, even anxious, to sweep
aside those who cannot pretend they are having an easy time in it. How strange it was,
then, wandering there alone on the frazzled outskirts of the well-ordered, self-policed city
of rational men and women, to find she had attracted me, a more or less healthy,
straightforward young man. It was a dream, too good to be true. I was kind, thoughtful,
patient (her own description), but not blandly so; I knew how to pass in the careless, blind
world, yet I had never forsaken my childhood passion to see beneath its surface, to know
life in all its complexities, to crack its hidden code. We fell in love at once, but naturally
31
for a while she resisted my attentions, until at last one raw February night a light flashed
in her head, and she understood I was her only hope.
Within a week she’d asked me to move in with her, and I did so at once, carrying
in with my toaster sincere promises that I’d take care of her, that I’d see her into the world
until in time she felt comfortable enough to perform in it herself. She warned me that this
was a gigantic task; she would be a lot of trouble, and after all she might never get there
fully. But I said I didn’t care, that really I could see no better way to spend the present.
Besides, she might be surprised to see how well I could do the job; in many ways I felt as
though I had been born for it. She seemed elated with the declaration, if still somewhat
skeptical, so at once I threw myself into the project with all my energy. I got her up in the
morning (no small feat), walked her to the Institute, right up to her classroom door, then
collected here there at night. After dinner I made sure she began her designs ahead of
schedule. Oh, she was good at her work, everyone knew it, far more talented and
ambitious than I was; in fact, watching her work made me realize something I’d
suspected all along—that in the end I would have to be content merely to do the
groundwork for someone else’s plans, check their calculations and measurements, though
of course these lowly tasks too are important in bringing any conception to reality. But I
didn’t envy her her success, not in the slightest. On the contrary I delighted in the
prospect of being that invisible hand pushing her gently toward her inevitable and welldeserved fame.
In the meantime, I chased off bill collectors, returned her library books, changed
her oil. In short, I gave her life a structure, a benign order, it had never known. This is
not to suggest we did not feel intense passion for one another, of course we did; in fact,
some people felt it was just the opposite, that we were all passion and nothing more. We
even had to learn not to let it spill over too much in public so as not to cause some
repressed individual to sigh enviously, “Oh, it’ll fade.” But most people, I’ve found,
cannot keep two ideas in their head at once. We, by contrast, were in perfect sync, our
relationship a self-reflexive operation; without passion we could never have sustained our
desire to complete the arduous labor on the mundane foundation of our relationship, and
without this foundation we could never have built that fantastic structure, that constantly
shifting, ever expanding dreamhouse in which we ecstatically dwelt for seven years.
True, at times early on Elizabeth simply couldn’t believe the floor beneath her
could be so solid and, as if to test its resilience, would lapse hard into fits of extreme
depression. After a dose of my relentless care and attention, however, she would always
revive, and with a swiftness that often surprised even me. Then in the middle of our first
summer, one of these fits lasted an unusually long time, almost two whole weeks. One
steamy night in July she woke up in a pale terror, tears streaming down her face. She’d
had an awful nightmare; she was sitting in a restaurant when suddenly her teeth began
falling out four and five at a time. In a panic she rushed to the ladies’ room, where a
woman who seemed to know instantly recognized the symptoms and dispassionately
informed her she had “dyspnea.” The woman said no more, but my wife knew that the
condition was incurable—that when you were out of teeth, you were out of time. There
was nothing she could do except to keep her mouth closed as much as possible in order to
prevent the remaining teeth from loosening.
32
Well, I managed to calm her down, and the next day we laughed some about the
dream. Dyspnea! We both thought it was one of those nonsense words our dreams piece
together out of fragments, a grotesque distortion like a minotaur, until on a whim we
decided to check the dictionary and to our surprise found it there whole, a real element of
our waking language; it named a kind of breathlessness, as I recall, a symptom of
hysteria. We spoke no more about the dream, but by evening Elizabeth seemed even
more agitated, pensive, and self-absorbed than before. When after a few days all my
usual methods of reviving her failed to take hold, even I began to doubt that I could really
help her. But then she missed a period, and after a visit to the clinic we had our
explanation. Elizabeth was relieved to have this biological excuse for her anxiety, we
both were; she’d really feared she was cracking up for good this time. Of course, having
the baby was out of the question. Our twin stars were just then piercing the evening sky;
neither of us could abide having them eclipsed even temporarily. The jarring effects of
the abortion lingered for days, but I did what I could—brought her flowers and tea, read
her Anna Karenina in seventeen different voices—and vowed never to let her suffer
again. Two weeks later, hours after our bodies had melted to sleep in joyful reunion, she
woke me up and whispered we should get married.
Was I dreaming? No. Brimming with pure joy, I leapt out of bed and to
Elizabeth’s immense delight ran ecstatically around the apartment, turning on all the
lights, waking up the spoons and forks, the umbrella and the broom, shouting them the
good news and accepting their various congratulations, their first words (It’s about time!
said the clock, an understandably impatient sort). And thus were they all welcomed to
life, to our blossoming world in which even the least among them were beloved.
So, yes, it was a difficult time, but a good time too, a time of celebration – at least
that’s how I see it and always will until I die, no matter what my wife says or does to
distort it. Oh, never try to save a marriage by asking for explanations; just take your
memories and go. It’s unbearable to see your history, even its most basic facts, twisted
and reshaped like soft clay in order to plug the gaping holes in some monstrous present
delusion. For now my Elizabeth contends she never did love me with a passion, neither
then nor even now, not really, not with her whole being. She says she saw early on that
despite her sincere desire to believe in them, all my benevolent “structures” cast more of a
spell on me than on her. For instance, as she “remembers” it, she never even really asked
me to move in with her in the first place(!); somehow I had just assumed that this was the
obvious first step in “my project.” Her pregnancy was thus particularly painful for her –
was I so blind that I couldn’t see how miserably I’d failed her? And yet there I was,
promising still more! But after all that was over, she’d decided what the hell, it wasn’t so
bad; in fact, the constant attention was rather nice at times, and I wasn’t a fool. Maybe
our life together would lack the passion, the magical, mysterious connection she’d always
dreamed of, but it was sweet. And wasn’t that what mature people did after all, give up
their dreams? To her surprise, there were times during the next seven years when she
came very close to loving me in this ideal way, but she insists it never really happened.
Then the very month her design was accepted for the new Children’s Theatre &
Exhibition Space downtown – the event that should have been the crowning achievement
of our mutual project – Elizabeth let these old doubts creep in and suck the life out of our
glad, spirited world overnight. Almost immediately – what a coincidence – she happened
33
upon that great mythological being whom she felt spoke “the wordless interior language”
she’d always longed to hear. It didn’t matter if he really was hopelessly unstable, as
everyone (including her!) believed; he was the “truth” for her, she said, and that was that.
As for our world, of course she appreciated it; it was wonderful and charming, a
marvelous, complex creation—but it just wasn’t enough. It was a living thing, almost a
child, but it wasn’t really hers….
Anyway, during the past few months I’d played this fiction over in my head so
many times that I’d almost started to believe it myself. It was a nightmare that plagued
me night and day – the whole last seven years a lie, a cruel joke, a mistake! No wonder,
then, that there in the darkness between exhibits in the Basement of the Psychoanalysis
Museum I became so haunted by doubt. Could it really be that the nightmare was all over
now, as it seemed to be? Had my wife really come to her senses and taken it all back? I
stole a glance out of the corner of my eye to see if the staked teeth had triggered the same
association in Elizabeth’s mind (they must have!), but by now the darkness was so
impenetrable I could see neither her nor our guide. Nervously I reached out my hand to
find Elizabeth’s but grasped only cold, damp air. “Elizabeth,” I whispered, but received
no answer. “Wait, where are you two?” I laughed out loud, then added weakly, “Hello?”
Silence, not even the hum of electricity. I cursed under my breath. I’ve always
hated to be lost under any circumstances, but what with my pangs of doubt, I felt doubly
anxious. I knew that once I’d found them we’d all have a little laugh over it at my
expense, then suspected that this was happening by design, part of the “experience” as
these people like to say. Well, I was in no mood for a funhouse; I had a serious matter to
discuss with my wife. I took a few faltering steps in the dark, but then stopped, feeling
queasy and uncertain. If you’ve ever been lost in the woods at night, you know what I
was feeling—any step you take is wrong. In fact, this was far worse—may I remind you
it was pitch black in there? Trying hard not to panic, I retraced my steps as best I could—
very steadily at first, fearing that any second I’d bump into something or fall down some
stairs, which I’m sure the museum’s sadistic proprietors would have found very amusing
from wherever they were watching. But after a while I grew desperate and just started to
run headlong into the black, every once in a while calling out my wife’s name and “I’m
over here!”
I ran like mad for what seemed an eternity, then all at once, as though I’d emerged
out of a bank of black fog, the darkness just ended, and I found myself in a large room
that was empty except for three rows of long tables. Though the place was but dimly lit, I
could tell it was a cafeteria, probably in the basement of an old elementary school,
judging from the smell emanating from the porous cement walls and dirty tile floor. It
was the kind of place which under normal circumstances I could have remained for some
time, blurring my eyes and imagining I was really back there in those old days long
buried. And I believe for a split second I did feel compelled to find my usual table, sit
down in the now far too small chair and watch other tiny familiar spirits materialize; peek
through the crack into the teacher’s lounge where both beloved and feared sat as though
undressed in a cloud of cigarette smoke; or crouch in the dark corner where they herded
us during tornado warnings, the black winds howling outside…
But I shook it off. This was no time for idle retrospection; I had to find the
museum’s exit, where no doubt my wife was already waiting, perhaps impatiently. I
34
hurried instinctively to the far right corner and to my immense relief immediately came
upon the stairs.
I ran up them three at a time, breathing heavily, Get out of the basement, Get out
of the basement, but at the top of them stopped dead in amazement. What a jarring
contrast! Suddenly I found myself at the edge of a huge, lavish hotel lobby or department
store, crowded with busy well-dressed people and divided in the center by a silver and
glass escalator. I shook my head in disbelief and was even somewhat amused by it all,
ready to forgive and even praise the museum’s proprietors; their basement was after all a
clever social comment, a haunting reminder of the desperate dissatisfaction this cheery,
careless buying and selling tries (and inevitably fails) to screen.
Oh, if it had only been that! Because just as I was about to step into this lobby, I
saw them, that hideous couple descending slowly, very slowly, down the escalator. They
stood out in the crowd in their dirty, ill-fitting clothes—the man tall and skeletal with
long, thinning, dirty blond hair, the woman short and dumpy with a head of matted,
grayish black curls. Their blotched red faces were hard and mean, but when they saw me
their eyes lit up with recognition and disgust. They bared their stained, crooked teeth and
whispered to one another conspiratorially, descending, descending, never once taking
their eyes off me. I stood frozen in horror until at last they reached the bottom of the
escalator and separated, the woman creeping with purpose off to the right, the man taking
long strides right toward me, bent on tearing me to pieces.
Now, I realize that at this point my story strains credibility – how could I possibly
have believed that what was going on was not just a tasteless trick, albeit a remarkably
complex one? I assure you I’ve considered this very question countless times ever since,
and the only answer I can make is that one should never underestimate the obsessive craft
of artists and psychiatrists; they among all people will never give up until they have
thought of everything, until they have closed up every exit by which you might escape
their experimental worlds. Individually they are bad enough; together they are simply
demonic. For instance, only later did it occur to me that what was so mesmerizing about
the couple on the escalator was that they were such grotesque doubles of my wife and me
– about a dozen hard years older, cynical, manipulative, stripped of the gloss of our
education and careful manner, but unmistakably us nonetheless. Only a very skilled
performance artist could observe a person for just ten minutes and then execute a
distortion of his character which the subject could recognize only from very deep within.
Further, I’m no psychopharmacologist (though I have since read extensively on the
subject), but I suspect the use of some hallucinogen, some invisible gas in the air which
takes effect some time after they’ve begun to show you their collection of “exhibits,”
which they know from exhaustive testing will strike at least one dissonant chord in every
man and woman. Whatever the reasons, at this point in my nightmarish experience I was
totally incapable of even considering what was real and what was a product of my blasted
open imagination. I’d even forgotten about finding my wife (more on her possible
complicity in all this later; after all she too must not be underestimated). I only knew then
that I was being hunted and that I had to run for my life.
I flew down the stairs and through the cafeteria until I came to what I supposed to
be the door of the teacher’s lounge. Inside, a handful of smartly dressed people were
milling about, discussing something in low, serious tones. When they didn’t seem to
35
notice me standing there breathlessly, I did feel some relief that somehow I’d stumbled
upon the museum’s exit, but at that point I could hardly be sure. Then I noticed another
door slightly ajar to the right, and to my surprise and elation spotted my friend M. sitting
by himself in a small, littered classroom. I went over and tapped him lightly on the
shoulder. He looked up with bleary eyes – they had him loaded up with anti-depressants
again – then finally recognized me and smiled faintly. Evidently the Weber doctors had
brought their boarders on a little field trip to the Basement of the Psychoanalysis
Museum, and now M. was filling out some questionnaire about his experience there
(what were you thinking when the lights went out? Describe your feelings). I glanced
over my shoulder at the men and women buried deep in their sober discussions and
shuddered.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said through my teeth. M. looked at me quizzically,
blearily; under medication it was very hard for him to process and respond to any
information, much less a request as wild as this. I started to blurt out that someone was
trying to kill me, but then stopped. M. had struggled very hard to trust his various
therapists; it might be too much of a jolt for him to hear that they were careless people, if
not downright diabolical. “It’s all right,” I went on, struggling to sound calm, “just tell
them you went with me.”
M. stared at me for a long moment, then slowly turned toward the doctors. They
wouldn’t mind; I’d often acted as his temporary escort to the real world. Then at last he
just shrugged, by now very much accustomed to following orders. But of course he was
supposed to be assertive too. “I should finish this,” he said, lightly brushing the paper
with the tip of his pencil.
I sighed and nodded. He was only about halfway through. “Just hurry a little bit,”
I said and checked the antechamber, which was now suddenly cleared of scientists – a bad
sign. I stared at the opening; at any second the head of my hideous double would slide
through the crack, first one murderous green eye and then the other. He has to know I’m
here, I thought, there’s nowhere else! Meanwhile, M. was laboring, pondering. He
probably couldn’t find his way out either. It was hot, I began to feel faint – trapped!
Then I looked all around and for the first time noticed another door slightly ajar leading to
a small blue room, apparently a chapel of some kind. God only knows what kind of
debased tricks they played in there! I braced myself, planted my feet; if the monster
appeared I’d run into the chapel and close the door. M. was rubbing his brow in weary
concentration. Question six, Question seven….Page Two.
That second page hidden beneath the first, my head all in a darkening whirl,
Victor’s ghastly cackling, those beastly killers in black pursuing me with their relentless
Kyri-e Ele-i-son – these are the last waking sensations I can recall from the Basement of
the Psychoanalysis Museum—though I certainly remained a prisoner there for at least
seven more hours. I must have left M. at once, dashed into the blue room perhaps, or else
back into the cafeteria and the ten thousand other rooms adjacent. It is impossible to say;
the rest of what I remember is all hallucination, or dream, though at the time of course I
was as convinced of its reality as I am right now of the pen in my hand.
Here is what happened: I opened my eyes. I was sitting in a chair in a hotel room.
M.’s brother D. was there with his wife A., talking and laughing with Elizabeth, who was
busy at a counter along a far wall, preparing a meal, I thought, chopping vegetables. All
36
was peaceful, happy; a warm breeze drifted in from an open window somewhere. They
didn’t seem entirely aware of me, and suddenly I understood that it was because I was just
now waking, not merely from a nap but from a deep catatonia, which had probably lasted
months, maybe years—no doubt the result of my trauma in the Basement of the
Psychoanalysis Museum.
Of course, I was thrilled to be once more among the living and was anxious to
speak my first words. Oh, I could already hear their joyful shouts, feel their embraces,
their wet tears; I was so grateful for their loyal care, for not abandoning me all this time, I
almost wept my way back into their world. But I held my tongue, choked back my tears;
for a while I just wanted to watch them, to celebrate every mundane detail that makes life
worth living, despite its pain. I remember looking, absorbing, thinking Window, doll,
Book, Cradle….Cradle? Yes, there was one there in the corner, an old wooden thing on
rockers I’d seen many times under a blanket of black dust in my parents’ attic, the painted
silver moons at its foot absorbed into the grain. And then to my astonishment I saw for
the first time what my wife was really doing there at the counter, not cooking as I’d
thought, but holding a baby, a naked, raw, blotched-red infant. I gasped inwardly – the
baby was ours!
How can I begin to describe my feelings at that moment? Imagine waking up to
your wildest dream, your most perfect conception of peace and contentment. I was
overjoyed, blissful, warm – it was paradise! Anxiously I began to search my mind for the
pieces with which I could fill in the wide gap in my memory, probably spanning a year,
but I groped in total darkness. At times I saw a flicker of light as from a shard of blue
glass, or an object, the brass doorknob to our bedroom – a whole world trying to burst
through the seams of the opaque fabric obscuring them. It was frustrating not to be able
to retrieve these objects, these memories, to hold them endearingly in my mind, walk
around them as at a museum, touch them, feel their solid weight, their remarkable
composition; but at least I knew they were there. I felt certain it would all come back in
time, each found fragment of the mosaic, no matter how insignificant, a cause for
renewed celebration.
Oh, if only it had all stopped there, if only I could have sustained that vision I’d
never have wanted to wake further. But too much had happened in the past for me not to
doubt it, and the very moment I did so, my pleasant hallucination turned into the
grotesque nightmare for which I’ll never forgive the cruel proprietors of the Basement of
the Psychoanalysis Museum.
Unable to retrieve any tangible pieces of my past, I abandoned my search for the
time being and sat enjoying the scene before me one last time before I would at last break
the spell with a single phrase, hopefully something very clever. It was almost funny, this
little domestic scene in which I’d played a key role without even knowing it. Evidently
I’d done something right, I laughed to myself, and considered saying precisely this as I reentered the drama. In fact, I was poised to take my first step on stage when suddenly I
stopped, paralyzed with the dreadful suspicion that I was misreading the scene entirely.
How could I be sure that this child…
No! It was mine, I assured myself, it had to be mine. And then all at once, I
received conclusive proof of the fact – to my unspeakable horror! All along my wife had
been happily cleaning the child, powdering his thighs, his genitals, but suddenly I noticed
37
that the latter were not those of an infant at all, but of an adult male. The penis stuck out
absurdly straight from its small scrub of tangled brown hair, white bumps at its base, a
mysterious black spot on its side. I will resist the temptation to omit one further shocking
detail concerning this organ, though no one would blame me if I did. Observe what a
monstrous place this museum was: the boy’s penis was mine, not as a matter of genetics,
but actually, physically mine. And suddenly I realized that my wife was not merely
cleaning the boy, but preparing him for something, an operation or a ceremony, though
apparently not circumcision.
At once I sprang out of my chair and rushed to the child, sweeping him off the
counter and into my arms. Contrary to my expectations, no one even blinked at my
sudden waking. My friend D. beamed with delight; as a new father himself, he evidently
took great pleasure in watching me deal with this wriggling thing, which despite my
attempts to secure a grip kept shrinking in my arms. At last it was the size and shape of
this one stuffed toy my wife had carried with her since she was two – a worn, brownish
red animal, some strange hybrid of bear, pig, human, and badger by the name of Cupid,
who was the first voice and brightest star in our domestic pantheon, having played all the
leads in our nightly readings from Levin to Felix Krull. Or at least I recognize it as such
now. At the time I was merely horrified that I was somehow harming the child. I wanted
to do everything right, especially since I had so boldly “rescued” him from my wife, who
oddly enough seemed to think nothing at all of my rash action; she was still busy at the
counter with something, and chatting with A. In a way it was as though I hadn’t done
anything – as though I weren’t really there!
Finally in a kind of desperation I plopped the child on one of a set of twin beds
that were placed very close together and which were remarkably similar to the ones my
brother and I had slept on as children, right down to the checkered pattern of the
bedspreads. I shrugged and made some offhand remark about this coincidence to D., who
was reclining on the other bed and still smiling at my clumsy handling of the baby. But
then as I babbled on and on abut the beds he began directing concerned glances toward
the child, who was now wobbling about on the very edge of the bed. Finally D.’s eyes
widened in alarm, and he reached out an arm, but it was too late. The baby had fallen
between the beds head first and was now struck, his stubby feet dangling stiffly in the air.
I laughed nervously and made a few awkward attempts at extraction, but for the life of me
I couldn’t’ figure out how to get him out without damaging his large, soft head. Oddly
enough the baby wasn’t at all crying, and evidently this eerie silence compelled the more
experienced D. to take command of the situation. He made a move to assist me, but I
waved him off. “It’s all right!” I said firmly, “He’s balanced on part of the mattress – see
there? It’s all right!”
I remember nothing more, except feeling a sudden hard pull on my veins and
arteries which constricted my heart into a tight knot – a side-effect of the drug, I imagine.
Oh, I don’t doubt that my total collapse greatly alarmed the museum’s dastardly
proprietors, made them fear reprisals from the authorities, lawsuits, etc. I can well
imagine their hurried, whispered discussions as to what they would do with me; perhaps
at least one of them took one look at me lying there in a quivering heap and thought it
best to dispose of the evidence entirely. But he or she was overruled by the behaviorists,
who agreed that they should stuff me with a sedative, rifle my body for identification and
38
keys, and spirit me away to my address. Then when I awoke the next day in the relative
safety of my familiar surroundings, I’d have to conclude it had all been a terrible
nightmare.
Torturers! I remembered it all, every detail! I awoke earlier than they expected,
around two in the morning on November the second, dumped on the floor like a beaten
prisoner (no doubt a concession to the sadists in the group). Still shaking with terror, I
phoned the police and demanded they go down there and arrest the lot of them. Then I
quickly called my wife. When she answered sleepily, I gave her a chance to explain; after
all perhaps she too had been trapped in the place, pursued by her hideous double. Perhaps
they’d purposely separated us so as to confuse us, or told her I’d left long ago in search of
her. Instead, to my infinite dismay (but not really to my surprise), she acted as if nothing
had happened. She merely apologized for not having called in a while; she’d been so
busy lately, her design and all. Then she laughed, fully awake now. She was glad I
called, something funny had happened the other day…
But I couldn’t take it any more. “Where’s your shame?” I cut in bitterly. “Can
you be so heartless? What have I ever done to be treated like this?”
There was a long pause. “What did I do?” she said quietly, already in tears.
“Besides the obvious.”
“The obvious?!” I shouted. “You brought me to that awful place under false
pretenses and then just…left me there!”
“What place? What place?” she said quickly, but I wasn’t about to listen to her
denials; they’d probably instructed her exactly what to say to try and confuse me. I
slammed the phone down, for the last time as far as I was concerned.
I stayed up the rest of the night, pacing about near the phone, smoking. Just
before dawn, Victor cackled himself awake, and impatient, I phoned the police once
more. Oh sure, they’d checked out the place, but they’d drawn a blank. There was a
haunted house, a bunch of black cats, and some women with pointy hats flying around on
brooms, but no Psychology museum, no sir.
Public servants! No wonder the world is in such a dreadful state. Radio,
television, the newspapers – no matter what I said or did to prove my respectability, they
all just smiled and nodded at my amusing little tale, gave me a cup of coffee, told me
they’d be on the lookout; but in the meantime why didn’t I just get a good night’s sleep?
Of course, it was essential that I speak to M. before the Weber doctors had
managed to expunge all traces of the contemptible place from his memory. When I
finally got through to him that afternoon and told him the story, I could tell that they’d
already begun the job. Think hard, I urged him.
M. did as I’d asked, paused in silence for at least thirty seconds, but then at last
sighed and said he was sorry. It sounded sort of familiar; they had indeed gone on some
kind of field trip yesterday, a job seminar he thought it was, where he did fill out a bunch
of forms, but to be honest he just couldn’t be sure. However, there were a few hours he
couldn’t account for. Unfortunately toward the end of the trip he’d had a few “incidents,”
as they called his compulsions, and so the end of the day was sort of a blur.
But I was relentless; I had to be in order to break through the dark fabric of lies
with which they’d blanketed his memory. Once more I described the place, this time
more slowly and in even greater detail – the exhibits emerging gradually out of the haze,
39
the rigid tour guide, the pitch black, the dim cafeteria, the littered classroom, the
questions, the doctors murmuring suspiciously in the next room…
“It could be,” he said suddenly.
I told him to keep thinking about it, and then an hour later went to see him at
Weber. As soon as we stepped outside onto the hospital grounds, he leaned closer and
tapped me lightly on the shoulder. “I was there,” he whispered.
My mouth dropped. Perhaps deep down I was hoping that it hadn’t really
happened, because now I needed proof. Was he sure? He told me he was, there was no
question about it. After he’d spoken to me, he’d thought more and more about the place
and finally decided to see what Dr. Mays, his therapist, would say about it. He told her
the whole story exactly as I’d related it to him, and when he was done the faintest hint of
a smile played at the edge of her lips. When he asked her what she was thinking – he was
proud of this, he’d never done that before – she seemed “a little nervous,” and then finally
shrugged and muttered something about a book she was working on.
“I mean it has occurred to me, too, that the mind is very much like a museum,”
she’d said matter-of-factly. “The way it tries to preserve the past by dividing it up into
floors and rooms. But all for the sake of the present.”
M. and I gazed at one another for a long moment, and then mirrored each other’s
smile. There was no need to have him describe the woman; no doubt she looked entirely
different from the way she had under the bluish white lights of the Basement of the
Psychoanalysis Museum – her hair released from its knot, her tour guide’s costume
stashed away in a closet somewhere. But how brazen of her, how vain, not even to
disguise her voice!
M.’s been working undercover ever since; any chance he gets, he brings up the
museum in therapy, gauges Dr. Mays’s response, then reports his findings to me. It’s a
long shot, I know, but don’t underestimate M.; as one removed from society he is not
only freer of its preconceptions, but freer too to exploit its weaknesses. Perhaps someday
Dr. Mays will crack or slip – certainly she feels some pangs of guilt for what she’s done –
and then we’ll have our woman.
In the meantime, I’ve told my story to everyone I know, and in the process have
brought those friendships which had been teetering on the edge to a crisis they aren’t
likely to recover from. One night soon after the crime, my wife called in great agitation.
She said she’d heard my story through mutual “friends” and was worried about me;
maybe it was time I talked to someone – a psychiatrist! I still don’t quite know what her
role in all of this was, but needless to say this was the last conversation we ever had.
A few friends like D. and A. are doing their best to remain loyal and sympathetic.
When I told them what had happened, they drove all the way into town and convinced me
that despite my terror of the place we should scour the scene of the crime for clues. We
spent hours driving up and down Brian Street and through all the alleys intersecting it – I
could barely stand it and would not even leave the car – but except possibly for an old
bathroom sink leaning against a dumpster, the museum had vanished without a trace. D.
stopped a number of passersby or shopkeepers, but of course they’d never heard of such a
thing. I can’t say I was disappointed; it was at least possible (if not in my view likely)
that the rest of the museum’s cowardly, degenerate proprietors had fled town for good.
40
Anyway, though D. and A. have never once questioned the veracity of my story, I
can tell they have their doubts. To tell the truth, I don’t blame them. Despite M.’s
corroboration, at times even I have wondered (as I was supposed to) if it was all just a
dream. But then all memories in time take on that hazy quality, even those from my very
real marriage. What’s more, a few times since then I’ve had nightmares in which once
again I find myself trapped in the Basement of the Psychoanalysis Museum, wandering
desperately through a few more of its terrifying exhibits, thus distorting the actual
experience even more.
For this reason I’m glad I’ve finally written it all out; now at least it’s clear and
permanent, as fixed in my mind as it is in print. Practically speaking, it’s my last resort, a
way of taking matters into my own hands. I’m posting hundreds of copies all over town
wherever lonely or desperate bodies tend to wash up – silent, murky bars and cafes, dirty
Laundromats, airless underground stations. PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE! If I cannot
succeed in closing this vicious trap down for good, I pray I can prevent others from
falling into it. It grieves me to know I will fail to catch the vast majority of you in time. I
see an endless procession, a long line snaking around the block. I see hard, bluish faces
bowed to the cold wind; I see arms folded, wet feet scuffling along the pavement an inch
at a time as though chained. Day and night I shudder with clairvoyant certainty that at
that very instant some innocent soul is descending into the Basement of the
Psychoanalysis Museum seeking a moment’s shelter and warmth, only to find countless
doors opening to his worst fears, a hall of mirrors reflecting the infinite facets of his
deepest shame, but no exit.
41
The Monologist
To be that sad man on the street, whom everyone notices as they pass—and yet, not to
know you are that man!
--Milosz, A Box of Paradox
Ah, dearest Jacqueline! To be truthful (and you know what great value I place
upon the truth!) I was thinking of you—well, let me be doubly honest then: I was talking
to you, Jacqueline, contentedly engaged in one of the many delightful conversations I’ve
had with your graceful image, since we parted, in the spacious green grounds surrounding
the art museum, and thus wallowing, as you say, in my precious solitude—when I first
saw, or I suppose, thought I saw . . .
But you see I’m breathless, getting ahead of myself already. Let me start again: It
was a perfectly drowsy spring day. The maples were bursting into the season, the young
and old alike garishly arrayed in their woolly yellowgreen sleeves, as if, drunk with sap,
they simply couldn’t help themselves. Dewdrenched spiderwebs lay nestled in the bushes
like lace handkerchiefs carelessly tossed the night before; and there hung in the sky,
besides the usual clouds, a rippling expanse of transparent wisps, which seemed to fade in
and out of the visible like the hazy ribs of a chest x-ray. For a while we lay quietly, you
and I, listening to he glad sounds of the season: the spitting squirrels—rats we tolerate
only because of their marvelous tails and their almost desperate work ethic, you always
said (or was it I?)—hopping from branch to branch, from tree to tree, like thoughts; the
ridiculous geese and children by the pond; all those dizzy spring birds; and the incessant
chatter of the happy pairs or groups of successful young people enjoying this delightful
pastoral moment away from their various studies and jobs. Every few moments, like
clockwork, all of these sounds would gradually recede under the methodical rolling
thunder of a jet soaring off into the distance, and then one by one return, adding on like
instruments, until the whole ensemble was blaring its sweet music even stronger than
before.
42
At last, perhaps influenced by the pleasant societies of young people all around us,
you broke our silence with a long critical assessment of my current situation, the gist of
which was all the usual nonsense: that really I must know that I was an extraordinarily
gifted, complex young man (I recall you forced me to admit this, though deep down I
know the truth of the matter: I have but one facet); that really my prospects here in the
city, where opportunities for such as myself quite obviously abounded, should be as a
result quite a lot better than they were; and that in fact it seemed clear I hadn’t sincerely
tried to find an appropriate situation at all! Yes, yes I know. We’ve had this conversation
countless times before—oh, if I could only focus!—and as always your deep
disappointment at last turned my laughter to heavy sighs. This time, however, I felt more
disconcerted than usual; I felt I could make no answer, no excuse—and you know the
rarity of that, dearest Jacqueline!
In short, your triumph was complete. I turned from your image in the pond and
sat there dumbly, looking out at all the successes strewn about the grounds in remarkably
regular twenty-foot intervals. Could it really be so, I wondered, that I had not tried to join
them? My gaze fell hard on every happy group, until in time I found myself
imaginatively among each of them, lying in the sunny grass, discussing our offices, our
ridiculous tight-fisted bosses; our subjects at school, our orthopedics, our torts, our preColumbian vases, our American Renaissance; our weekends (Let’s go in together on a
beach house this summer, us four—oh and Jack too of course, though we’d have to get it
in writing, and what if he tried to bring that awful woman D. again?); our relationships (I
was inquisitive, but reticent myself; probably they thought me a casualty of love—oh, let
them!); and our things, of course, at all times our marvelous things, our cars, our,
fashions, our computers, our sound equipment, our art . . .
Enough of your laughter, Jacqueline! (I’m glad to see I still amuse you). Of
course I realize I pretend like this all the time, and perhaps it is one of the ways I have of
ensuring that I never actually take my rightful place among these successful little crowds.
Well, if you can imagine the conversations, why actually have them? I could see this little
irony forming on your lips then, even as I’m quite certain I do now. So I was preparing
my inevitable retort, some humorous deflection, perhaps a sham apology for the sublime
powers of the imagination, when just then, just behind you, a sudden stirring in the pond,
I saw him—the monologist, I mean.
Only you, dearest Jacqueline, would not be surprised that it took me so long to
notice a figure lying not one body length away from me (though you would tease me
mercilessly about it, me and my “powers of concentration!”). And really I cannot explain
why of all the hundreds of these desperately lonely souls wandering the streets of this
wretched city, I noticed this particular one, on this particular day—especially since it’s
more than likely I’d seen him countless times before. Perhaps it was simply that he
provided such a stark contrast to my previous imaginings. Indeed, how remarkably
different he was from the lithe, youthful bodies I’d been lying with only moments before!
How solitary, how uneducated, how poor by comparison. And how free! I added, almost
as an afterthought. (Yes! Hear me out, Jackie!). I suppose we all felt we were really
letting our hair down out there in the rolling green the city had so thoughtfully provided
for us, drinking in and so fully believing in this illusion of open space. But the chaotic
43
sprawl of this dirty bearded man in the pond put us all to shame; by contrast, we seemed
as rigid as Marines!
Curious, but not wanting to stare (as if that would have mattered to him!), I kept
my eye fixed on his image in the pond as, muscle by muscle, dead sleep unbound him.
His body was contorted for maximum comfort, his face and palms pressed flat against the
soft grass, his right knee thrust up to the level of his waist. I tell you he looked like a
murdered corpse just waiting to be outlined in chalk; or else like one of those science
fiction heroes (or villains) who boldly transport their molecules across seventy-seven
million star systems, acquire the human form by passing through our rich atmosphere,
and materialize in the middle of another typical day in the metropolis suffering from an
understandably immense, perhaps “galactic” fatigue. I remember you laughed at this
latter idea, and as ever were quick to point out a further irony: No doubt a great deal of
time and effort and perhaps even money had been spent back home making sure the
traveler would blend in here (since if we discovered his secret we’d surely kill him)—and
yet even so the poor soul didn’t even know how to lie down properly!
These were your last words for a while. Your image before me gradually faded as
I instead turned my attention wholly to this “alien,” who did indeed seem as if he didn’t
quite know where or even who he was. He was a haggard, bearded man, about my size
and probably, behind all that wear, about my age. He was wearing blackened jeans
stuffed into weary old army boots and a greenish black blazer, underneath which was a
stained and tattered blue t-shirt, which may at one time have featured an advertisement of
some kind, but which had now been reduced to a singled word: AUTO. On his head
were a thick set of bright yellow headphones (not connected to any player I could see),
and on his hands were a pair of dirty gray garden gloves. Poking through the hairy leather
mask that was his face was a large bump of a nose and two small black eyes that nearly
merged into one over the bridge. With a remarkable, almost enviable, absent quality, he
began to rub the corner of the right eye (or the right side of the one, if you prefer) until
even I could hear it crackling. He stopped in vague alarm—where was that crackling
coming from? Then, no doubt as our imagined alien would as well, he touched every
major part of his body as if to make certain it was all there, pausing in apparent delight
when his hand happened upon a cloth satchel slung over his right shoulder. The bag was
literally bursting with papers of various sizes and shapes.
Now, although this man’s lips began to move the very second I noticed him and
rarely stopped through all his gestures, I did not at first understand the extent to which
this characteristic defined him. Who was he talking to? I wondered. Could he possibly
be talking to me? I admit at first I turned away, just as you would have, dearest
Jacqueline, pretending I hadn’t heard. We walked in such vastly different circles, why
embarrass us both by engaging in a dialogue which, however brief, would invariably
make this painfully clear?
But perhaps at bottom I’m somewhat more empathetic than you, or at least more
curious about my fellow man. “Pardon me?” I said, without looking over at him—I
suppose I had to maintain at least some distance. But as often happens when one is
suddenly addressed by a stranger, I spoke in a voice directly imitative of his and thus no
more audible. Of course, I could not then know that he was incapable of hearing me, or
at least not in any conventional way, so absorbed was he in the endless twists and turns of
44
his own monologue. But at the time I could only assume he hadn’t, so at last I turned
toward him and repeated my inquiry.
Oh, dearest Jacqueline! What an uncanny sensation to find him gone, vanished!
My words tumbled into the vacant space and were carried off by the next breeze. Baffled,
I looked all around until I spotted a figure half-buried in a trash can about thirty meters
away. Naturally I doubted it was him; unless he really were an alien, it was impossible
for him to have rematerialized at such a distance. And besides, not only had he for some
reason (as if he needed a reason!) removed his yellow headphones, but his frame seemed
overall larger and more powerful than before, his hair and beard even longer. However,
since there was not another person even remotely like him nearby, at last I just blamed
these discrepancies on the distortion in the pond. At which point you chimed in, dearest
Jacqueline, that even more likely I’d simply had yet another of those “blank spells” you
complain so often about—really I am listening at these times, dear; I just find there’s so
much to consider before one commits to a response. But fine, you caught me; I’ll admit
such a spell was at least possible—in addition to the distortion, of course.
Whatever the case, these mysterious circumstances only intensified my curiosity,
because at once I took off after this figure, trailing him around the pond. Out of the
corner of my eye (I always feared he’d suddenly turn and confront me), I watched him
make the rounds of the park’s trash cans, plunging half his body within for almost a
minute before at last emerging with one or two samples of the precious unredeemed
aluminum dangling from his fingers. After cramming these into a plastic bag (whither
the satchel?), off he’d go to another, and another. It was only after I’d drawn a little
closer that I heard a low murmuring just beneath his efforts; apparently he could make no
movement without discussing it with some imaginary interlocutor.
Because I had only moments before been reclining in those charmed circles of
youth strewn about the lawn, I was particularly curious to observe the ripple of disruption
that would pass over each group as he jangled and jabbered on by. Oh, dearest
Jacqueline! How alternately kind and cruel people are. Not a single group seemed
unwilling to listen to what he had to say, perhaps even to help if they could, help him find
his way, for instance. And yet not one of them could restrain their laughter or snide
remarks or even their expressions of disgust when they realized this passing individual
spoke not to them but to the invisible. One young man seemed at first unaffected by the
man, but then allowed himself to mutter, in a kind of light-hearted yet I thought very
sincere despair, that if he ever became such a monologist, they (his friends there gathered)
should take him out and shoot him—which produced a hearty burst of laughter all around.
A laughter you join even now, dearest Jacqueline: Oh really, a “monologist”—so
that’s where you picked up this term. Astonishing the marvels you are discovering these
days! Well, I’m glad to see I still amuse you anyway. But if you must know, yes, I
found the term somehow . . .inspiring. That is, I suddenly felt genuine compassion for
this person, this monologist; I wanted to understand him fully, I wanted to see the world
from his point of view. What exactly was he saying? I asked myself. Were his incessant
effusions mere commentary on actual images or occurrences there in front of him, or
something more coherent and self-contained, a developing theory or philosophy, or else a
story, the story of his life repeated endlessly to the end? And how had he become
45
reduced to this extreme of solitude? Did he hear us? Could we participate in the telling,
change the theory, alter the story’s unique course of events?
Then suddenly you, dearest Jacqueline, reappeared in front of me, wearing that
little smirk that creases your delicate face whenever I’ve fallen into one of your traps—
trapped myself, you always say, and I won’t deny it—and suddenly my profound interest
in this monologist became quite clear. Isn’t this, after all, precisely why I had to leave?
Of course, you wouldn’t have said this (that would have been far too cruel); but you’d
have thought it, no? Oh, I don’t want to get into all that. You yourself realized that
considering my past struggles I was doing the best I could; in fact, when you left I was
almost there, almost a whole person, an individual—three years away at the most.
I digress, I know, but well you know, Jacqueline, such is my nature. If I fight it at
all it’s only because I have a complementary interest as well in order and completeness.
You may scoff at this if you like, but I assure you it’s the truth; in fact, I might further
argue that it’s just this desire for order and completeness which produces the digressions,
no matter how apparently random they seem to you. Of course I’m always building to a
point, but a structure does not necessarily prove the weaker for its many flourishes. But
now I’m merely repeating myself, and that’s another matter altogether.
Anyway, you smirked, I was trapped. You nodded in triumph and would hear
none of my weak objections—though even now I would insist that we weren’t nearly so
audible, dear—and at last I surrendered. How true, how true, how true it was. I was far
too alone in the world. Bidding you a hasty farewell, I promised I would try harder to
find my place among the successes; I believe I even boasted I would assume it that very
afternoon. But really I did promise sincerely. I felt at least that much shame.
Of course, I forgot all about the monologist, who in the meantime had wandered
off to another, more fruitful, grove, I hoped. In a way I still wished to see him again, if
only to recall the part he’d played in my morning’s reflections, which at the time I felt
certain were the most important I’d had in years. Circling the park with light steps, for
joy I almost sat down right there and then with a couple of the happiest, brightest, the
most exclusive little coteries to show my good faith. If I declined it was only because I
felt it satisfactory merely to have had the revelation at all. How marvelous they are, those
very rare moments when with great suddenness all becomes electric and meaningful and
you truly know yourself better: Finally, a day salvaged from the scrap heap of the
mundane! Oh, but Jacqueline—would that the day had ended right then!
Filled with such noble ambitions, but not as yet with the material substance
necessary to realize them, I proceeded first to my usual café, an untidy little establishment
which was located on a side street on the extreme edge of downtown but which proudly
called itself Central Lunch nonetheless. Oh, I hear you groan at this: What on earth were
you doing at such a place? Suppose I were to come to visit—would you really presume to
take me there? Certainly not, dearest Jacqueline. For you I’d find the coziest nook in
town where we could drink tea brewed with a dozen spices and steal glances at ourselves
in the table tops. But allow me to say a few words on behalf of this humble eatery—alas,
gone from me now.
Central Lunch stood on a block the developers had as yet overlooked in their mad
rush to demolish or refurbish, right next to a defunct business called Kennedy Hearing
Aids, which had in its window some grayish cardboard ears standing around a photograph
46
of JFK delivering his famous speech at the Berlin Wall. More than likely these two
establishments were once joined as a pharmacy owned by these poorer relations of the
Camelotians; Central Lunch probably stood on the site of its soda bar, magazine rack, and
candy stand. In any case it seemed less like a café than a room where one could just
happen to get something to eat, and a very tiny room at that. It had only twelve small
wooden tables, six on either side of a path leading from the entrance to the front counter,
but a three-foot-high mirror lining the walls all around made it appear much larger,
infinitely larger. A confusing array of decorations were hanging all around the room.
Some perpetually celebrated the various holidays of the year—an innocent bear staring
blankly at a mostly deflated heart-shaped balloon (its cheery “Be mine” constricted to “Be
me”); a fiercely determined jack o’lantern and a skeleton with movable joints (his bony
hands gripping his chest cavity); and a daggerlike star of Bethlehem forever evading its
stumbling pursuers (the eldest had fallen and was blocking the way)—which overall
suggested not that these holidays would come round again, but that they’d all come and
gone for good. Scattered in among these were scattered photographs of someone’s
yellowing grandchildren, a strangely identical bride and groom baring their teeth at one
another, and a far too young serviceman, his chubby, forlorn image retreating into an iceblue haze, a dusty dime store flag dropping from his frame. There were also some
curious works of art: an oil portrait of Jesus of Saxony; a papier-mâché giraffe from
hanging from a light bulb; Picasso’s melting vision of Don Quixote and Sancho; a
silkscreen of a panther pouncing out of a psychedelic urban jungle; and an embroidered
unicorn, its solitary horn pointing to a rainbow underneath which was stitched the
following aphorism, the veracity of which you and I have disputed over coffee a number
of times:
A House Divided
Cannot Stand
Not surprisingly Central Lunch never attracted much of a crowd. A few people
ducked in briefly, took one look around, and wisely rushed out again with coffee to go.
Occasionally some individuals (no one ever came to Central Lunch in pairs), finding
themselves in the area with an hour to kill while they waited for surgery to be completed
on their cars or loved ones, would actually sit down in front of a plate of eggs or a greasy
grilled cheese sandwich. They chewed and chewed, their eyes drifting helplessly around
the indigestible décor, until at last they’d happen upon their many selves in the strip of
mirror and turn away at once to the relative reassurance of either their food or the sticky
red cement under their shoes. In twelve minutes, finished or not, they’d pull away from
their tables with a loud scrape, drop some coins out of their pockets and flee the scene in
a great hurry. What a mistake! A pleasure ruined! Precious leisure time wasted! No
doubt it would take hours for them to get the taste of Central Lunch out of their mouths;
only much later, when properly returned to their comfortable homes, could they afford to
laugh it away. “Oh!” they’d exclaim, turning suddenly from their desk or television set to
whomever was nearest, or even merely to themselves, “I ate at the most awful place
today!”
47
So the café had only three regular patrons: a very old, raggedy-suited man who
had a cough so deep it no longer reached his mouth for expulsion, but instead just rolled
around his gently quaking body like a roll of distant thunder; a rugged middle aged man
with long hair and beard, a construction worker by trade, though out of work now for
some time; and yours truly of course. We all sat at a distance from one another, myself
and the consumptive old man by the corners closest to the door, and the (ex)laborer
between us but further back near the counter. We never would have dreamed of speaking
aloud but for the harmonizing efforts of the old woman who ran the establishment, our
cook, Anna Welk. Anna had owned and operated Central Lunch for twelve years, ever
since the demise of her husband (Lawrence, believe it or not). She had no children but
boasted of having many close friends all over the city. We never saw the slightest
evidence of a single one of them, however, and after a while I began to suspect she’d
made them all up; perhaps even Lawrence was not merely a coincidence but a simulation,
a dream, some hybrid of fiction and fat. She was certainly the type. She lived just
upstairs but prided herself on spending every waking hour in the café—could she help it
that she loved to cook, that she loved the smell of food? This I couldn’t possibly doubt;
Anna was immensely fat and seemed if possible to be growing larger every week. Quite
often she’d tease the three of us about our comparatively small appetites, then turn her
bulk toward one of the mirrors in which a great crowd of Annas were filing in and out.
“Oh, look at me!” she’d exclaim, as if she too were surprised at the great wobbly slabs of
flesh spilling out from her dress at every opening. “I’m still my best customer!”
Anna was exceedingly cheerful and friendly to her patrons, or at least she was to
those she allowed in. As bad as business was, she was oddly selective as to her clientele.
Of course, who could blame her if she was quick to bark away the real estate developers
who periodically dropped by to see if she was ready yet to sell, or else to die? Not that
they cared about the rude treatment; in fact, they seemed to find her amusing, since even
in her most extreme eruptions she could never really sound that mean. Anna had one of
those weak, high-pitched voices that originated in the far back corner of her throat and
rolled its way up and out, as if the word “strudel” were tumbling about behind everything
she said. The contrast with her physical immensity and her fierce scowl was jarring, and
these realtors, these traders in reality, couldn’t suppress a broad smile at her outbursts. Of
course, one had to admire Anna’s pride in rejecting their business: They all had
somewhere else to go, somewhere better—well, let them go to it then! However, Anna
was even more intolerant of those whose destinations were severely limited—drunks and
vagrants who had deeply disturbing affects they couldn’t conceal because they were
unaware of them. Every two weeks a short, stocky bloodfaced man burst through the
door, spread his legs far apart, and shouted with great urgency, “How many miles to
strawberries?! How many miles to strawberries?!” After a few times I could tell he just
wanted to be invited in, to begin conversation with the rest of us, but Anna would have no
part of him. “Ninety-nine,” she’d snap, “Go drink yourself a quart!”
It was quite unsettling—who knew why Anna was so vehemently opposed to such
people. Only one such individual got past her threshold and even spent thirty minutes in
the sanctum sanctorum of Central Lunch. One autumn day around noon, a gaunt, quietlooking man wearing a disheveled postman’s uniform came in, sat down at the far end of
the counter, and after politely ordering a cup of coffee, began reading a few letters from a
48
stack neatly tied with a black rubber band. Anna was very friendly to him at first—now
here was a regular customer, the most regular of all. However, after she refilled his cup a
few times, Anna began to realize he wasn’t a postman at all, that in fact he was reading
other people’s junk mail which he’d found discarded on the steps of nearby apartment
buildings. Well, Anna blew up: “Get out, you, you faker! Or I’ll call the police!” The
poor man was stunned. He tried to stammer something in his own defense (“Th-they
didn’t want them!”), but when Anna took a few heavy steps around the edge of the
counter as if fixing to throw him out, he hastily gathered up his “mail” and ran out the
door.
He hadn’t done anything illegal, of course, though it is unsettling, don’t you
think? Real postmen are disturbing enough, every day making their relentlessly regular
rounds—who will receive the death letter today? But after all we’ve created them for just
this purpose: death, yes, but only in the abstract, only at a certain time, on certain days,
painless and fair—a clean contest, the rules for which we all know well and accept. And
so we grow accustomed to these symbols of our inevitable demise, even wait by the door
in glad anticipation of their familiar rustlings, or boldly surprise them in the act and
engage them in small talk. But this gentle fellow who had wandered into Central Lunch,
this postman poseur, broke that trust, smashed the myth; in truth, it was the others who
wore the disguise. He was the fallen angel, the true agent of death, a death as random and
careless as the sweepstakes entries he was poring over—untimely, violent, pointless. Oh,
no doubt he was lonely like the rest of us, yearning for connection, however slight and
artificial, to a confusing, hostile world, but I was with Anna all the way. How much more
terrible truth could a place like Central Lunch stand?
You certainly have your head in you hands by now, dearest Jacqueline, your mind
reeling with my contradictions, which I know you always pitied. Go ahead, sing it (you
have such a pretty voice): You say you value the truth only to run from it; you build up
Central Lunch only to tear it down! Very well, I contradict myself; I never got the hang
of making them seem rational, as you always could. Let me add another while I’m at it:
Yes, I supported the banishment of the postman poseur—I even held the door for him as
he flew by—but these episodes, especially this one, always left me numb with fear.
Really there was no reason to assume that Anna wouldn’t someday turn on any one of us.
Certainly we all had our eccentricities—where exactly was the line at which point Anna
would no longer welcome us like beloved family, but would instead give us the broad
back of her hand? When exactly would we become too strange for her company, “fakers”
bent on deceiving her?
In a way it was a kind of trap. From the first time each of us entered her
establishment, Anna tested us, determined our deepest desires (our delusions, you might
say), and every day thereafter handed them back to us, verifying them as the most cheery
realities. It worked like this: For a long while we’d simply listen to her long monologue,
which consisted mostly of a confusing series of anecdotes about her many friends and
Lawrence, punctuated by little pronouncements on the most mundane matters, such as the
weather (“The cold makes you feel like such a prisoner!”) or the business of running
Central Lunch (“I bought two towels yesterday. Everything runs out. (Long pause, heavy
sigh.) You always need something.”). Then all of a sudden she’d break off, and like a
schoolteacher trying to wake a daydreamer, she’d direct all her attention to one of us.
49
“Mr. Harrah, how’s your wife?” she’d demand of the consumptive old man, and
after a few body quakes, his back still turned to us, he’d mumble a long tale about a
woman whose name would change as many as three or four times per story. The stories
varied greatly, but every three weeks or so he’d reprise a variation of the one about how
Doris (or Deborah or Delilah) had had a birthday last Saturday (or Sunday), and soon a
small intimate gathering at their home on Apple/Blueberry/Cherry Street had become a
great crowd of her co-workers from “the hotel,” “the sweatshop,” or “the railroad.”
Something would happen—two men would get in a fight over a woman, the police would
come, everybody would be slipping and sliding on the ice (or mud) outside, then at last
the two parties would have a good laugh, cigars, liquor, etc. Doris (et al.) was now 133
years old, one year more than Mr. Harrah—the only fact he ever revealed about himself.
There was no way of telling how much of his stories were true. At times I was
certain he had been married, and then unhappily deserted or widowed, a personal travail
from which he’d never recovered. Other times I was convinced he hadn’t been married
at all, that out of his solitude he was merely inventing what he’d missed—or else he was
in the fight himself, say, or just in the crowd. Or maybe the stories belonged to someone
else entirely, maybe he’d read them in the newspaper one time, or seen them in the
movies. It was impossible to say.
However, our host Anna never made the slightest effort to correct his “errors”; on
the contrary, she always nodded her head in apparent belief and often expressed surprise
(“My word!” she’d say) at some sketchy detail we’d all heard numerous times before. At
first I gave her credit for playing along, for humoring the old man, but never once did she
wink at the rest of us nor avert her eyes to show the proper duplicity. Rather, she listened
to the stories wide-eyed, spellbound, engaged; her many questions and interruptions never
served to qualify the tales, to check their veracity, but rather to assist in their formation.
It was as if she were entering deeply into the tales themselves, perhaps even absorbing
them into her being—as if when Mr. Harrah had at last gone from Central Lunch (and
really that couldn’t be too long), his stories would become hers.
I mean in a sense they were hers to begin with, as indeed everything about Mr.
Harrah was, even his name. For there were no formal introductions at Central Lunch; you
came in as nameless as the day you were born and waited. One day Anna called you
something, and from then on you never failed to respond to it.
Well, of course! you laugh, You dared not correct her, lest you’d go the way of the
postman poseur! Very well, I admit it feely—but it was so much more than that. The
longer we stayed on, the more enmeshed we became in the stories she’d woven around
us—but happily so. Even the laborer gave in to her, wrapped himself in the comforting
fabric of her imagination. Unlike Mr. Harrah and myself, he was not a man of many
words, but rather of hard, silent reflection. How often I used to sit and wonder what
philosophy of personal freedom, what harsh challenge to the status quo, was passing
through his mind as he stared into the deep black well of his coffee. Most people are in
some way intimidated by such fierce independence; either they angrily dismiss these dark,
distant types as conceited or mean, or (as in my case) feel somewhat small and vacuous in
comparison and so leave them in peace.
But Anna never flinched. “So, John, John,” she’d say—don’t ask me how she
saw fit to pin this name to such a man—“What job are you going to look at today?” And
50
“John John” would sigh, look away, shrug, and then barely mutter something under his
breath—maybe something in an auto shop, a paper mill, public works. It wasn’t much,
but it was more than enough for Anna. In no time she had him working all over town:
“How’s the shop?” she’d say, or “Do you make this flour bag at your plant?” I admit I
was surprised at first when he didn’t correct her—oh, he wasn’t afraid, or maybe he was,
in his way. Sometimes one couldn’t help but smell the stale odor of alcohol on his
person; as fierce and rugged as he was, he stood exposed to the cold world outside and
would die of it sure, in good time. But here was Anna, building a kind of shelter all
around him—naturally, not by any “design,” which he would surely have rejected—using
the bricks of his own character and the mortar of hers, so that before he knew it he found
himself inside—secure, comfortable, alive.
As for myself, well, as you can imagine, dearest Jacqueline, I was a much easier
project for her. I’ll never forget my elation when, after setting down before me my
breakfast—eggs always so neatly paired in the center of the plate that they seemed to stare
back like bulging, weepy (yet friendly) orange eyes—Anna paused and cast her giant
shadow over the many scraps of paper I had scattered all over the table. Yes, I’m still
making my notes, “the very picture of my distraction” as you so lovingly called them—
more of them than ever, in fact. A terrible waste of time, I know, but under Anna’s
transformative gaze, they coalesced at once. They became important, even exciting; in an
instant, they were bound in leather and placed high up on the shelf of essential volumes.
“My word, Professor Racecar!” she said sweetly, “you’re writing a book!” That
strudel voice! It slid all over you like warm butter over pancakes until you too felt coated
with your dreams. Certainly “Professor Racecar” (How do you like my new name?
Actually, I prefer a more eastern European spelling, Raszgar, or something) was writing a
book; Professor Raszgar was writing ten thousand books! Philosophies, histories,
biographies, novels, epic poems, sketchbooks—you name it, in the weeks that followed I
was writing them all—or rather, Anna and I were writing them together. Everything I had
been thinking or mumbling to myself for years at last received full voice, because only
Anna could hear them as they longed to be heard. Oh, I was hopelessly trapped; there
was no way out of Anna’s labyrinth, her hall of mirrors. But I tell you truly, dearest
Jacqueline, I never once considered making an escape. Within the walls of Anna’s
remarkable prison, the possibilities for discovering new rooms seemed endless—just as it
did, at one time, in yours.
But now—Oh, Jackie!—it’s all gone. Will I never hear that voice again, except in
cold memory? That’s right, once again I’m banished, alone – and all because of that
monologist I saw by the pond!
In a way I knew the game was up the instant I walked through the door. As you
recall I was elated by our conversation—oh, but I was! Really I did feel that I’d broken
through, that at last I would begin to find my way into one if not more of those magic
circles we’d seen on the museum lawn. By the time I’d reached Central Lunch that
afternoon, I even felt I would no longer need the comfortable illusions it afforded. Not
that I now repudiated the place—it had certainly served its purpose—but without question
this was to be my last appearance. Professor Raszgar had an announcement to make; he’d
finished his books, and now it was time to move on to other challenges. He would never
51
forget them, however; he would periodically come to visit, write postcards, etc: God
bless you all! Farewell!
Indeed I was mumbling this speech to myself as I banged open the screen door.
However, instead of the usual loud, cheery greeting from Anna, I received only a hard,
blank stare. I froze in my tracks; everything seemed stopped yet intensely active too, held
in dazzling suspension, like the stars. Was there something wrong with me? I wondered.
Was it my broad smile? Then on instinct I whirled to my left. Mr. Harrah’s place was
vacant. I turned back to Anna and John John for an explanation, but both of them had
already averted their eyes. In a daze I walked over to my usual spot and spread out my
things, my papers, as I always did. And then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the
greenblack blazer, the stained blue t-shirt, the yellow headphones…
Impossible, but true! It was the monologist, my monologist, just to my left. At
once I suspected that he was another reason for the tension in the place, besides Mr.
Harrah’s absence; perhaps Anna and John John felt they couldn’t talk of private matters,
the old man’s death or banishment, in front of this stranger. But these were my last
thoughts about Central Lunch for a while. From then on I was so rapt with this monologist
that I neglected even to see Anna when she came by with my coffee. Oh, dearest
Jacqueline! If only you could have seen him, even you would have had to admit he was
fascinating. His lips were moving rapidly, as if in fervent prayer, but every once in a while
he suddenly stopped and listened for a moment in great concentration, as if straining to
pick up a faint signal coming to him from a distance. Then all at once he’d crack his
mouth wide open, nod appreciatively, and pick up from the table a small plastic pouch
crammed with crumpled notes and yellowed scraps of newspaper clippings, on top of
which was a fading magazine photo of Jackie Kennedy (or Onassis; I could never
distinguish between the two). For an instant he’d hold it before him like a hand mirror,
then at last, for a good five seconds, gently press it against his lips in a rapturous kiss.
Imagine my joy, dearest Jacqueline, at this remarkable coincidence, this wonderful
evidence of the unique bond (sealed with a kiss!) that existed between myself and this
total stranger, as if somehow he’d been sent to me by some unknown power. . . Oh, but
now I’ve done it, haven’t I? You’re speechless, you can’t even smirk: Don’t tell me
that’s what all this nonsense is about—not that ridiculous old notion that somehow you of
all people bear a “charmed life”? I’m afraid so, dearest Jacqueline—would you have me
lie? I know you must find it pitiful, even disgusting, that I could even dream that it might
be so, that something about me somehow made me special, in tune with mysterious forces
beyond rational comprehension. I could argue that everyone feels this way to a certain
extent Yes, but such childish fantasies one must surmount, not indulge! even you, I dare
say. Anyway, you certainly did your part to cure me of this idea, you and your
(supposedly) rational, calculated acts of “pure will.” Oh, I needn’t be reminded how far
from “charmed” I really am, but such ideas about oneself die hard, if at all—presuming
they should die—especially when one needs them to survive.
But let’s not fuss. Forget I even mentioned it; I’m merely trying to explain, for
better or for worse, why I became so enthralled by this monologist. Immediately after
he’d kiss his little icon—forgive me if I admit I’ve done the same with your image—he’d
begin to write, as if inspired by his muse, harnessing his thoughts on paper in a series of
circles bouncing up and down the page, connected by arrows. When he’d crammed one
52
circle with writing he’d move on to the next, creating a sort of flow chart of ideas, a
diagram of his mind. For instance, just after the first time he interrupted himself,
listened, and kissed Jackie, he wrote the following:
NOW I
UNDERSTAND
CLEARLY THE MID
1800’S TYPE ENVIRON
MENT FROM WHICH
HENRY DAVID
THOREAU
WITHDREW
IN ORDER TO
CREATE A SPIRITU
ALLY CONSTRUCTIVE
REALITY ALL HIS
OWN AT WAL
DEN POND
Oh, how I strained to record every word! For once again, I could never bring
myself to look directly at him, but rather kept my head still and pulled my eyes to the left
as far as they could go. But what was he saying? Very gradually I leaned my body to the
left as far as I could, and as I did so he seemed to lean as well and raised his voice ever so
slightly, as if to meet me halfway. His voice, his tone, surprised me; it was much less
refined than his written thoughts had led me to expect, though more appropriate to his
costume—more working class, if you will, rough and distant. Perhaps you’ll recognize
certain aspects of his story as I did. Something very much like it happened about seven
years ago, right around the time we met—or was that when we parted? I’m sure I still
have the newspaper clipping of it somewhere; at one time I’d thought it perhaps useful to
include in one of my many books.
But enough of my blathering. Here is the monologist’s story in his own words,
exactly as I heard, or at some moments, saw them. Let us call it:
The Billboard
People, they wonder what I do for food, and what I do for water. For some reason
they don’t think of rain as water, or snow and how if you melt it down . . . ‘course it
doesn’t taste too good, almost like a bitter syrup, something like the yellow smoke in the
53
air, I guess. It doesn’t matter to me; by now I’m probably covered with the stuff. But up
here taste doesn’t matter anyway, not like it does to people down below. Which is why I
wouldn’t tell them about the pigeons even if they asked, which they don’t, not any more,
not even the papers. People can eat pigeons, and I suppose if it was in a restaurant it
would be fine, but they don’t like to think about the dirty places things come from. I got
a trap set up, which I guess I could describe, but it’s not all that interesting. Besides,
most times I don’t even bother with it.
What people wonder about most, though, is how I can stand it, how I can stand
living on a billboard ledge that’s only 44 feet long and 8 feet wide, 50 feet above a
highway cutting through the ugliest part of the city, without even a single person to keep
me company. But I figure if they have to ask, I could never explain it well enough for
them to understand. So I just say, “Cause it’s free,” and that usually satisfies them. Then
it’s just as they expected.
The people from the radio station are the worst, though. They think I have
something personal against them, and I suppose I did at one time, but it was never just
them, and now it’s nobody. They come by every once in a while just to tell me they don’t
care how long I stay up here; no doubt when their lease on this billboard runs out at the
end of this year, I’ll be brought down by force. In the meantime, my little protest is
having no effect, they say, ratings are better than ever. And don’t think that they’re liable
for any injuries sustained, they’re not, and never have been—I can die up here for all they
care.
They don’t say it exactly like that, but that’s the gist. Oh, but they cared an awful
lot about me at the start. I remember when they first called to tell me I’d been one of the
three guys chosen for their promotion, it was like I was supposed to be the luckiest man
on earth or something. When I told the marketing guy who called that I was unemployed,
that I’d got laid off at the foundry a few years before, he could barely hold in his glee; he
didn’t even try. “Really? That’s perfect,” he said, “So you really need this mobile home,
then.” I said I supposed I did. “Great!” he said and laughed. He was just bubbling over;
maybe the whole thing was his idea or something—nobody ever listened to WEW.
“Well, between you and me, Jack, you’re a lock,” he said. “I give the other two guys a
month, two months tops.” He told me he’d see me at the sign above Rte. 33 on April 1 at
6AM sharp, then gave another nervous laugh; I think he was waiting for me to thank him,
so finally he just did it himself: “What a country, huh?” he said.
So they had it all figured out from the start, putting me right smack in the middle
of the billboard, so it would look better when the other two dropped away and there I was,
front and center—the survivor, the loser who won. But I sure gave them a jolt when they
first led me up to it and saw the giant silver blue Eagle Supreme RV from Faust Motors
rolling in from the lower right hand corner with those huge red letters and our names
beneath:
WEW Record Breaking Hits presents
THE GREAT KING OF THE ROAD ENDURANCE TEST!
54
Harry
Jack
Otto
I stopped cold; I looked back at them like they were crazy. “I can’t do this,” I said.
I guess I scared them, but they tried not to let on. “Sure you can,” the marketing
guy said, Rich I think it was, and then laughed and mumbled about how it wasn’t as high
as he’d thought, but still, what a hell of a time they were having setting up for the remote
they were going to do in twenty minutes, we’d better get moving. He put his hand on my
shoulder and gave me a gentle push toward the ladder. I stiffened for a second, then just
gave in. There was no way out, not really—I had to go up there. I took a deep breath and
climbed the ladder real fast, so I wouldn’t be tempted to look down.
Evidently most everybody else down below thought I’d win too. People’ll bet on
anything; I was the clear favorite at 5-7. I guess they just looked us over once and
decided Harry was too old to stand it and that Otto was too young, that sooner or later
he’d get restless. Meanwhile, I had that mean, desperate look—though that could mean I
didn’t give a fuck either way. I mean I’d have never bet on me. At first I was sure Otto
was going to win, because of all of us he was the only one who had something to do up
here. Otto was an artist, a painter, and he had this idea to make the mobile home into
what he called The Moving Studio Medicine Show. He planned to paint the side of it just
like the billboard and travel all around the country with a few other people who would do
a kind of play with music about what happened up here. Inside, he’d have a gallery with
all the paintings and sketches he did while he was up here, as well as those he was
working on during his travels.
He seemed very excited about “the Project,” as he always called it; it was
practically all he talked about. The idea behind it, he said, was that while everyone likes
to think they’re free, it really wasn’t so easy as all that. What makes people free is how
they can imagine things out of nothing, but instead of organizing everything around this,
they just keep on living and dying within their one mean way of doing things, until after a
while they really think there’s no other way, no other choice.
“Amen,” I said, and his eyes lit up—it was like they were feeding on my attention.
“People are like paintings, Jack,” he said with deep seriousness. “No matter how alive
they seem, they never live beyond their frames.”
But not if Otto had his way. His Moving Studio Medicine Show was going to
smash those frames, he said; it was going to make people stop and think about what it
means to be in prison and what it means to be free—to be stuck somewhere without
choices and to move all around just as you please. They’d be surrounded by all kinds of
images suggesting both ideas at once, and somehow this was supposed to give them a
life-changing jolt. At bottom, the Moving Studio would be a mockery of the whole
promotion here, which was itself a mockery of how people live; both showed how people
in general were just humiliating themselves without even thinking about it.
“Look how they’re using us, Jack!” he said, spreading his arms out wide against
the billboard. “This way I turn it all inside out, so people can see it for what it really is!”
55
To tell the truth, I sort of liked the idea. Anyway, it seemed as good a use for the
mobile home as anything else. I liked Otto too, I really did—which was fortunate,
because I could tell he wanted me to, badly. One of the first things he told me was that he
was born premature when his mother happened to be struck by an arrow shot by one of
the two men who were fighting over her. He showed me the newspaper clipping and
birth certificate to prove it. He was very proud of the story, like in a way that was all you
needed to know about him. Maybe that explained why he was such a funny-looking guy.
He was fairly well-built but short, so it seemed like he was a bigger man who had been
shrunk. He had narrow eyes, one of which always seemed to stare past you to a point just
over your head, or up and just to the left, and one of these perfect brown beards that are
so well-trimmed they seem like they never grow, like artificial turf. He was about
twenty-three, but for all his big talk I could tell that he wasn’t entirely sure of himself. I
mean, “Prison,” “Freedom,” he knew about all that just fine, but you know he hadn’t
really seen either one.
And it made me angry, if you want to know the truth. I mean I liked Otto, and I
even sort of wanted him to win—who knows, maybe he’d have taken me along on his
crazy trip as a real-life prop! But people like Otto, they can make you so mad, because
they just sit there and calmly tell you why your life is so miserable; they carve you up like
a cadaver and show the class—“See his lungs? That’s what happens when you work in a
foundry.” Even if they’re dead right, it’s humiliating to be the poor sucker who’s been
trapped by a lie, who’s trapped himself; in some ways it’s just as bad as being on a
billboard. But I have to say too, because I see it now, that just as much the anger is
because of envy and regrets. I mean, how come it was so easy for Otto to do what he was
doing? I don’t mean his talent at drawing, a lot of people can draw a little. What I mean
is, if it’s so important, why didn’t I know about art? I’ve seen plenty of pictures, and I
always knew there was something to it, but what? How come I grew up without knowing
what art was for?
So that’s what I said to Otto after he finished his long description of the Moving
Studio: “What for?”
“What for?” he repeated weakly. “Well, so people can see—”
“Yeah, but what for?” I said louder and gave a shrug. “How’s that going to help
people?”
Otto tried to mumble something about, well maybe if one person sees the truth,
and all that, but he knew it wasn’t so. Then he started to think out loud—maybe that was
a good idea, to make the Moving Studio like a soup kitchen too—and when I laughed out
loud, he finally just threw up his hands and told the truth. “Well, I have to say
something,” he said softly, “and this is all I know.”
I smiled and nodded, which I could tell made him feel a little better. And maybe
the soup kitchen wasn’t such a bad idea. “I do like the pictures,” I said, and he lit back up
to full brightness—it was almost funny how little it took. But it’s true, I really did like
them. Maybe it was because of his narrow eyes, but it was amazing what happened to the
view from our balcony whenever he put it on canvas. For some pictures he soaked a wide
brush in these sickly bright colors, awful pinks and greens and bloody reds, and then
everything—the streetlights, or the highway signs, or the tall signs for gas and motels, or
the factory smokestacks, or the collapsing row houses—looked almost alive in a scary
56
way, like aliens on some kind of search and destroy! For a long time I wondered how he
made it so everything seemed to be drifting or else blowing by real fast like the wind or
the cars and trucks rumbling down 33 just beneath us, and then I noticed one day that it
was because he never had things touch the ground; I mean, in his paintings there was no
ground. Sometimes he’d just do the whole thing in a wash of blue or gray, but other
times, especially as the summer dragged on, he’d just use thick squiggles of black, so that
everything looked burned to a crisp. Like most everyone else I guess, I was always partial
to paintings that pretty much made things look like they are, but after watching Otto do
these for a while, I began to think that maybe I was the one not seeing things right.
Sometimes I’d look real hard until my eyes hurt trying to see what he saw, and for a
second or two I think I did. Anyway, I certainly saw it that way in my dreams. But for
the life of me I could never figure out how he could paint the ones of the three of us on
the billboard, as though he were sitting on another one across the highway.
Otto did one of me and him in the black squiggles melting under the sun, and then
in late July, one of just me. One morning I noticed he was looking at me for a long time,
then he finally came up to me and said real fast, like he always did when he had an idea,
“Excuse me, I just have to say, you have incredible presence. It’s not strength exactly, or
determination—but it’s something. It may be that I’d just never noticed, or it may be that
it’s just happening to you since you’ve been up here. Which would make sense.”
Then he asked me politely if he could paint my portrait. I thought it over for a
minute, then figured what the heck, it would kill some time—not nearly enough, but
some. So he did this painting of me, which I still have in my tent. I’m standing up on the
billboard in my dirty army jacket with my hands gripping the railing real hard, the name
Jack just behind my stringy head of hair. Since I wasn’t shaving, I didn’t have any
mirrors up here, so that was the first time I’d seen myself in three months. I think Otto
was right; I’d already changed into what I am now. And he was right, it wasn’t strength
at all; it was more like satisfaction, like I was in exactly the right spot at the right time. I
mean, I didn’t know that yet myself, but somewhere in my mind I did. I was starting to
see things, and know things in a way I never had, like everything was becoming clear and
meaningful and true.
It was just the opposite for Otto. As good as he could see things to paint, he
couldn’t see things going on right in front of him. For instance, there was what happened
with the girl who used to bring us our meals every day, Annie. She was a husky girl with
dark circles under her eyes and a pile of dark hair that looked like a wig. She always
wore the same pink-striped uniform of the hospital where she worked nearby, but you
could tell she wasn’t all there herself. She had this cheerful, giggly sort of voice, and she
was always smiling and asking questions—she was thrilled to be the one who got to feed
us every day, and fetch us cigarettes when we ran out. But all of a sudden if you asked
her a question or else said something she didn’t understand, she’d think you were making
fun of her and start to throw a terrible tantrum, like she was three years old. I saw this
right away and was careful from then on, but Otto seemed not to notice at all and was
always teasing her, telling tall tales about our “magic billboard,” like how each of us had
a little man to talk to us when we got lonely. For a while it worked. “You lie!” she’d
always laugh, but she believed it some; in any case she loved all the attention.
57
But then one fine day in June, instead of waiting for one of us to come and get the
food from her like always, she insisted on bringing it up the ladder herself. It wasn’t
dangerous or anything, but I knew Annie wouldn’t be able to take it. About halfway up
she stopped laughing and started to look down. Well, that should have been the end of
that, but instead of trying to calm her, Otto just kept cheering her on. “Don’t quit,
Annie!” he kept shouting, “You’ll make it! Wait ‘til you see how far you can see up
here!” I think he really thought he was helping her. Finally after a few more rungs,
Annie dropped the food, hugged the ladder tight and started screaming bloody murder. I
went down to meet her, but it took about an hour to get her to see that she wasn’t stuck
for all eternity, that she could just go back down one rung at a time. From that day on she
never said another word, just left the food at the bottom of the ladder and hurried off. She
still sneaks over every once in a while to bring me scraps from the hospital; I always take
them, for her sake.
The point is, Otto was like Annie in many ways, like a child, I mean. He always
said he’d had almost no love in his life when he was young, but I could have guessed that
anyway. For all his talent and his “Projects,” I could see he was the type that needed to
be taken care of. When he wasn’t talking about his art he was talking about his “muse,”
this woman named Jackie he’d been living with for a couple of years. She was an artist,
too, an actress. Of course, she was going to play a big part in the Moving Studio—in fact,
the whole thing was mostly her idea, he said. Oh, she was a major talent, a real star,
everybody thought so. The truth was, he was nothing compared to her, he said; without
her belief in him, he didn’t know what he’d do.
That kind of talk made me suspicious to begin with, but then after I saw this
Jackie a couple of times, I knew Otto was right, and that as a result he was going to get
burned. She was a tall, dark beauty who wore shades to cover the dark circles under her
eyes, or else to draw attention to them. I can easily see how someone like Otto had fallen
for her; she had that air about her that if you let her she’d solve all your problems for you.
What Otto didn’t know was that it didn’t have to be him in particular who she was
helping, but just anybody. The moment she was done with him, she’d just move on.
Maybe she didn’t plan it this way, but in a way it was a kind of trap. She’d made Otto
totally dependent on her for everything, even his work, and now all of a sudden—well,
for instance she wouldn’t play any of his games, not really. Being up here on the
billboard was Otto’s big thing, but she was always quiet and distant about it—she could
take it or leave it—and I could tell this made him feel small. By August, even Otto
started to sense that something was wrong. He got more and more nervous whenever she
came by, and quieter in between.
Oh, I’d seen it all before. Me personally, I’ve been on both sides of it. The last
time I got caught up in pretending was the biggest disaster of my life. At twenty-two I
decided I’d be good, I’d get married and settle down like everyone else I knew had.
Somehow I convinced this young girl just coming out of high school, Delores, that I’d
take care of her, get her anything she wanted – a big house with not just one but two
stories, cars, you name it. The funny thing is, I believed it too. I really thought all you
needed was a job at a foundry, and then you’d just save up for a couple of years, and
before you knew it, there you were, living in your dream house, like it was a reward,
something they owed you for breaking your back like you did. Anyway, as far back as I
58
can remember that’s how people made it sound. Then we started having kids, and even
though I was working sometimes sixty hours a week we could never get out of the hole
we’d dug. I had to hide it even from myself that the house just wasn’t going to happen;
my method was drinking, but there are plenty others. Delores, though, it took her a lot
longer to figure out. Every month it was the same old thing—when were we going to get
out of the dump we were renting? Why didn’t I just go get a raise? But I kept telling her
it would be all right, and somehow she always believed me. She probably felt she had no
other choice.
When I got laid off finally, it was kind of a relief. By then it had been about seven
years, and Delores knew she’d been trapped. We both felt like fools. There was never
any love between us; it had been just what was nearest and easiest, what was next in line.
So was this ending, I guess. It wasn’t so bad for me—I didn’t care what I had or didn’t
have—but Delores was crushed; she felt like her whole life was wrecked, wasted. What
the hell was she supposed to do now? She wasn’t pretty any more, and she certainly
couldn’t work; the kids were already a lot of trouble, more than she’d expected. She took
it out on me by having an affair with an older guy who managed a Rite-Aid, and I guess
after all that she got most everything she wanted. She moved way out of town and
wouldn’t let me see the kids—said I was a bad influence, because of the drinking, which
I’d more or less stopped even then, and now don’t do at all. But I probably was a bad
influence; I certainly wouldn’t have wanted anybody to look up to me.
I bet when she first heard I was up here on the billboard she laughed out loud.
Wasn’t it just typical of that lazy bastard who couldn’t even buy a house to try to get one
for nothing? And you know, I wouldn’t necessarily say that wasn’t a reason for me being
up here, I mean as a matter of dumb pride; I said I’d get a house, and well, here it is! But
really from the start I had no idea what I’d do with a mobile home, except just sit in it
somewhere. I suppose I thought it might be some kind of new start for me, but deep
down I knew it was a lie. Do you have any idea how hard it is to make a new start? I’m
only thirty-three years old, but the way things have gone I feel more like fifty-three.
That’s what I meant before when I said I’d never have bet on me. I just didn’t care
enough to win, though in the end, none of us did.
Truth is, by the end of the summer I was sure it would be old Harry. From the
start he was the only one of us who acted like it was a competition; not once did he come
out and sit or talk with us, so I never really knew his story. But one sunny afternoon I
watched him lie down for a nap in front of his tent, and I thought sure I knew him. He
put his shaggy gray head gently down on a rolled up mat and sprawled out flat on the soft
boards of our platform, but then the moment he started to fall asleep, all at once every
muscle in his leathery face simply let go, gave up; any hint of the smile he’d been wearing
just dropped off his face. His jaw fell open into a pitch black cave – a dead man’s mouth.
I shook my head in disbelief, then looked away and back. I’m still not sure I was
right, because I never asked him straight, but from then on I always thought of Harry as
this guy who worked in the foundry when I first started there, back when I was just a kid.
Everyone called him “Half-day,” because that was his schedule. Every morning he’d
come in right on time, and while the rest of us were putting off starting as long as
possible, he’d set to filling the molds or breaking slag with a vengeance. I mean he
worked hard without saying a word to anybody, right through breaktime. But come noon,
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he’d hear a whistle no one else could, and that would be it for him for the day. He’d
spend an hour or so hidden away in a corner reading the paper, eating his lunch, smoking
endless cigarettes. Meanwhile, we’d all be at the trough breaking slag, the most hell-like
part of working in that hell—smashing up all the leftover metal that had cooled into this
glossy black rock, then carting away the chunks for God knows what reason. Then all of
a sudden you’d hit a pocket of the rosy molten metal underneath and stop just for a
second or to smear the black sweat across your eyelids, and there standing almost right on
top of you was Half-day, smoking cigarettes and screaming some crazy story over the
blasts of the jackhammers. Half-day’s stories were always long and involved, usually
something to do with some member of his family, which was as far as I could tell the
whole human race, there were so many of them. Some were so unbelievable, I figured he
must’ve been taking them right out of the newspaper he was reading before he’d come
over. Like the one about his uncle Red who ate only fresh strawberries and so almost
died every year when they weren’t in season; or his cousin who went around
impersonating security guards at museums and banks (he just wanted to help, he said); or
his sister Dee who had twice worked it so that two men ended up fighting a real-live duel
over her and was now setting up the third. Sometimes these people would meet up with
one another, and it was like a battle as to who the story was really about.
It would go on and on like this for the rest of the day with only a few
interruptions. Half-day must have had a keen eye or nose for when the supervisor was
about to come by, because all of a sudden he’d stop in mid-sentence and say “Watch me
now!” and get to work like everyone else. Then as soon as the supervisor went on his
way, Half-day would let the shovel drop from his shoulder and pick up his story and his
cigarette exactly where he’d left off. Every once and a while somebody would get mad
and say ”Come on Half-day, grab yourself a hammer,” but no one ever pushed it too far.
For one thing, everyone knew he’d already done the work of any two of us who worked a
whole day, but for another—and I think this was the main thing—while he was there
telling stories, we could forget what awful hot boring work we were doing. Every once
in a while we’d interrupt with questions, which never tripped him up but made the story
take a whole new turn. Before we knew it, the day would be over, and those of us trying
to get overtime would try to convince him to stay on. But he never did.
“Don’t be a fool,” he’d say, “don’t you have nothing better to do?” Really, old
Half-day was the best storyteller I’d ever heard. It was clearly what he was best at, and I
always thought it was too bad there was no job for it.
Anyway, this went on for the whole first year I was there, just as it had for the ten
years before that, but it came to a quick end when Jimmy Fern got to be the supervisor.
At first we were all happy about that, because Jimmy Fern was one of us— but you know
how these things are. One of the first things he did to show us that he was the big boss
now was to try to get Half-day to straighten up; either he worked a full day like everyone
else, or he was out the door. Well, Half-day wasn’t about to change for nobody—not out
of stubbornness, but because he just couldn’t. The way he did things, that was part of
him—it was his name! Of course, he learned Jimmy Fern’s ways, as he had the other
guy’s, and he was never caught. But Jimmy Fern had been there, he knew what Half-day
was doing, and not being able to catch him at it made him feel stupid – more like one of
us. So one day out of the blue, right at one o’clock, the word came down from above.
60
Half-day was stunned; his mouth dropped open, but he couldn’t speak. It was a terrible
thing to happen, an awful injustice—the first I’d seen at the foundry, though of course
there’d be plenty more. It was stupid besides. We didn’t do near the work we did while
Half-day was there, and you’ll probably be glad to know that Jimmy was handed his ass
the following year.
Of course, in time like everyone I just forgot about Half-day; when someone got
laid off at the foundry, it was like they’d died. You’d never see them anymore, and after
a while stopped wondering about them. The last time I thought about him was five years
ago when I got my walking papers along with half the other people at the foundry. It’s
funny, but breaking slag all day, even though you’re like a slave or a prisoner, after a
while makes you start to feel powerful, like nobody can break you no matter what. But
then, all of a sudden, it turns out you’re just like so much dust, and you get swept out the
door like nothing. Sure some guys get themselves pieced back together somehow,
especially if you’re lucky enough to know somebody somewhere, but for what? Just to
get used up all over again? Sure I tried to find something else, but what else is there
really? The longer you go without everyday work, the more you realize how much better
you feel not getting pounded on every day of your life, for eight full hours, maybe twelve
if you’re desperate enough. You just have to wonder who made up these rules, how it all
got locked up this way. Look at Half-day. What the hell’s the matter with four hours? Is
that really too much to ask? Would the whole goddamn country collapse if everyone just
worked four hours a day? I don’t think so, but even if it did, you have to think it would
be better off in the long run.
So ever since then I’ve wondered a lot about Half-day; I’ve looked for him
everywhere, seen his face in every bar, on every sidewalk grate. That’s probably why
Harry became Half-day for me when all of a sudden his mouth dropped open in falling
asleep as I described. It was how I remembered Half-day most of all—not the stories, but
that awful silence at the end. Ah!
THE HAR
DEST TASK WE
FACE IS TO DISC
OVER OUR WAY INTO
THIS WORLD NOT
OUR MASTERS
WAY
NO!
THE ONLY
WAY THAT IS OURS
IS THE ONE WE CREA
TE EACH OF US
OF OUR OWN
POWER
SLAVERY
NOR EVEN THE
WAYS OF THE PROP
HETS OR PHILOSOPH
ERS HOWEVER HU
MANE THEY
SEEM.
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So in a way I wanted old Harry to win, even though if he really was Half-day, he
was changed. Maybe people like Jimmy Fern finally broke him down, because now he
was cold and silent; if he had any stories to tell he was keeping them to himself. And
since I could see that Otto wasn’t going to be up to the test he was about face, I was sure
Harry was going to win. But then came October, our seventh month up there, and
suddenly I knew it was going to be me.
Otto got the pink slip on the first of the month. Jackie hadn’t come by in a couple
of weeks, and as soon as she appeared down below you could tell it was a done deal.
Otto asked her what was wrong, and she sort of shrugged and said she was undecided
about the Moving Studio trip; she was going to get her own place somewhere, she needed
time alone to sort things out. It was a terrible thing to watch; it was like she was doing a
newscast. Otto was stunned speechless, then finally he broke.
“No!” he shouted so loud you could hear the echo off the billboard. “What do you
mean ‘undecided’? What are you saying? I’m coming down!” He took a few steps to
the ladder; Harry poked his head out of his tent. But Jackie held up her hand, and Otto
stopped dead. It wouldn’t do any good, she said coolly, that was just the kind of pressure
she was trying to avoid. Then she acted surprised by his reaction; after all, she’d never
said she was going with him for sure—didn’t he remember that conversation? Obviously
Otto needed time away from her too, she said, he was much better off where he was. It
would be a shame if gave up his Project now, just because of her.
Otto listened quietly as she spoke, then shook his head and began to sputter: “But
I need you!” he said. “I can’t do anything without you. I’ll be alone!”
Well, Jackie shrugged that off as ridiculous, and it was, but on the other hand she
wasn’t being entirely straight with Otto. Maybe she just couldn’t face what she was
doing to him, but she just kept emphasizing that it wasn’t necessarily over between them,
she just needed time to think about it. Who knows, she said, maybe she would end up on
the tour after all; it was just at this particular moment she couldn’t say she was very
hopeful. Well, as bad as this looked and sounded, it was all Otto needed to keep his
hopes alive; but then a week later a friend of his dropped by, and she let slip the truth that
there was somebody else involved, somebody Otto knew. Otto felt like a fool; everyone
else knew but him! And that was the end of Otto’s “purpose.” From then on, as he saw
it, there was nothing for him in the world down below but loneliness and humiliation, just
like his paintings said. After all that, his worst fears had come true; Otto was stuck up
here on this billboard like the rest of us.
Otto couldn’t paint any more; he didn’t even like the things he’d done up here any
more—they were all so flawed, he said, he was such an amateur. So he stayed quiet most
of the time and hung around me a lot. Then the endless rumbling of the highway started
to get to him, so he took to wearing these headphones they’d given us to shut out the
noise so we could sleep. I put on mine too, to cheer him up, I guess, or just to be with
him, and he seemed to like that so I kept them on. The funny thing was that it was only
then that I first noticed Harry’s deep coughs; it’s like the headphones filtered out
everything but. Even if he weren’t really Half-day, that cough placed him in the foundry
for sure. We all had it from breathing ash all day long. If you could ever get any of it up,
62
it was like black pearl, but most of the time it just rolled around your chest like a heavy
cloud—but hot, like from a fire.
But I could tell Harry’s was worse. He was older that me anyhow by about fifteen
years, though he looked like he was about 60—which was another fringe benefit of
working at the foundry. And as the nights started to get cold, Harry’s cough grew worse
and worse. Meanwhile, a big debate started to rage down below. For some reason,
nobody ever dreamed we’d last this long up here, through all the rain and wind and hot
sun, and never getting to bathe properly, and kids throwing stones and cans at us at night,
and just the sheer boredom of it all. But people always underestimate other people’s
desperation. Anyway, people started calling in to the radio station about whether they
should call the contest off now that the cold weather was coming on, or if they kept it
going, whether or not they should give us heaters. Some people said if we didn’t get
heaters we were liable to freeze to death up here, which would be a national disgrace.
But other people said no way, that the contest was only now getting interesting. It was
survival of the fittest; let nature decide, they said.
No one ever got around to asking us what we thought should happen. I think
WEW had been looking for a way out of this thing since September, but all this uproar
made them see there was still something to milk out of it. So they gave us the heaters,
though the day they brought them up I could hear through my tent that Harry of all people
was raising a fuss. “But it’s almost over!” he kept saying. He might have been right; I’d
already decided that as soon as Otto went down, I’d go too. On the other hand, the state
Otto was in, I started to think it might be up to me to lead him down. But then too there
was Harry’s cough, which despite the heaters just got worse and worse. I told him we
should get a doctor up here to look at that, but he just scowled and said mind my own
business. I tell you, I was all confused what to do, but not in the way which got me up on
the billboard in the first place. This time I knew I’d have a part to play, a part for me
alone; even if I didn’t know what it was yet, I knew I would when the time came, I was
positive of that.
So it got cold all right, cold and wet in the way that goes right through you so that
you start to feel divided into two, your mind drifting apart from your body until you find
you can only use one or the other at a time. But like anything you get used to it, and after
a while none of us was even using the heaters at all. Christmas Eve was the worst day of
all; everything was gray and blurry and seemed to be floating somewhere over the layer of
snow on the ground, like in one of Otto’s paintings. Some guy from the newspaper came
up to take a picture of us looking out over the balcony at the star of Bethlehem decoration
the city puts up on the Kennedy Central Building every year. “The Three Wise Men,” he
laughed as he snapped his camera.
Without even thinking I took a couple of steps toward him, as if fixing to push
him over the side—really I did, and that surprised me. It wasn’t because he was making
fools of us—I’d got used to that idea right from the start. No, it was because somehow
I’d got to the point that I didn’t want anybody who wasn’t one of us to come anywhere
near the billboard. It was like an invasion. I couldn’t just walk into his house and stand
him up against a wall and say hold this and bam! Merry Christmas, motherfucker, you
know? Wasn’t there anything about this whole deal that was our own, besides the mobile
home none of us cared about any more and two of us would never even see? If I didn’t
63
toss the jackass over, it was only because at the same time I still felt the idea of protecting
what we had up there was just too ridiculous. But for a second I sure put the fear of God
into him—and Otto and Harry too, I think. Then I just gave a short laugh and turned
around toward my tent, trailing steam over my shoulder: “Well, you’d better tell them
not to wait up this time,” I said, “because these wise men aren’t going anywhere.”
I stayed in my tent for the rest of the morning and into the afternoon, just staring
up at the canvas, feeling powerless and mean. Then about three o’clock Otto poked his
head in. I cleared a space for him like always, but he just shook his head and crawled
back out. That was how we communicated after a while, in just a few words and signs. It
was a strange situation. While on the one side, what with his cough, Harry seemed to be
aging like the devil, Otto seemed to be going in the opposite direction, getting even
younger. By this time he was like a four-year-old; or at least he acted like my youngest
son did the last time I saw him, tugging me by the sleeve and not letting go.
So he didn’t say, but I could tell Otto wanted to show me something he’d seen
outside, and I crawled out after him. Somehow all the gray had cleared off, and the sky
was a bright blue. The snow was colored slightly golden by the sun and had melted
evenly on top of the cars in the lot below into perfect soft chunks that were sliding off the
roofs like butter on pancakes—or that’s what Otto said when he pointed them out to me,
murmuring through my headphones, “Like butter on pancakes.” We sat there for hours,
and every once in a while Otto would break the cold silence between us with something
like that. He pointed to the streetlight poles, which were blotched in spots with frozen
dark patches. “Giraffe necks,” he said. At dusk, he pointed to the sunset, a bloody red
eye squinting at us through the strip of yellow brown haze on the horizon. “The Spanish
sun,” he said. Night fell, and all of a sudden two stars flashed in the sky: “Panther’s
eyes!” When the chimes rang at midnight, he had his head on my shoulder, and I could
feel his teeth chattering through my coat. It was bitter cold, but there wasn’t any wind at
all. Everything was still and quiet; all you could hear was Harry’s constant hacking over
there in his tent. All of a sudden Otto raised his head and pointed to the distance. “The
rainbow!” he said excitedly “Half a man!” I asked him what he’d seen because I couldn’t
find it, but he’d already buried his face in the wool of my jacket, fast asleep—dreaming, I
imagined.
This went on for the next two weeks, the coldest, windiest, darkest days of the
year. I didn’t even notice when the new year came in, except for some car horns way in
the distance that honked for a few minutes and then just faded away into the black night.
Other years, even when I was most miserable, usually I felt something the moment the
new year came in – some sudden charge, a feeling of being in between things, a
wondering about what’s happened and what’s coming next, though never in any
particular way, not in detail, I mean. It’s just a sudden jolt, like a backfiring, or a record
skipping, something that makes you notice yourself—a feeling that whether you like it or
not, you’re alive. But this time even after I’d heard the car horns and so realized it was
the new year, this time I didn’t feel anything at all. And I knew exactly what the reason
was. This thing happening to people down below, sweeping across the country like a
great shadow, this wasn’t my New Year’s, not anymore. New Year’s Day for me would
come on April the First, one full year from when I first came up here. If I ever wondered
whether I’d changed at all during this time, then there at last was my proof. And what’s
64
more, I didn’t mind the difference, not in the slightest. Oh, I saw it all clearly now. I
knew exactly what was going to happen, and what I’d have to do.
And I didn’t have to wait long. Five days later, just like that, it was all over.
You’ve probably read all about this already; I’ve told it over and over – to the police, the
radio station, the newspapers, even Annie and Jackie, anyone who asked. It was a bitter
night, zero degrees I think. Otto and me were in my tent, not sleeping but just listening
quietly to the howling wind. I remember wishing it would start to snow so that then we
could build a wall against the tent that would break the wind. Then I must have fallen
asleep, because the next thing I remember was the silence. I stared up at the dome of my
tent and listened, then took off my headphones to be sure—no wind, no cars, nothing at
all! It was time, though to tell you the truth I didn’t think about it that way. Like in a
dream, I just got up and crawled out of my tent.
What a beautiful sight! I’d got my wish; it was snowing, but the flakes were
drifting down to earth so very slowly they seemed pinned against the black sky like a
whole galaxy of stars. I stood there with my mouth open for a while, getting quietly
covered with the hush, like everything else. The whole picture seemed frozen, like the
whole world was standing still. I don’t remember when I was ever so happy as right then.
Finally I shook the snow off my beard and turned to go wake Otto, just so I could hear
what he’d see in all this, and that’s when I saw it, that low mound of white near the
railing in front of Harry’s tent.
It was like a deer kill, lying in a silent heap by the side of the road. I took a few
steps, and then a few more, my boots not making any sound at all in the snow on the
platform, until finally I was there, and I bent over it. “Harry?” I whispered, and then
when that didn’t work, “Half-day?” It was no use; there might have been something they
could have done at one time, but it was too late now. I knew exactly how it happened, I’d
heard about it at the foundry so many times before. All of a sudden, you stopped
coughing, and your body filled to the kin with hot ash, with that rosy metal at the heart of
the slag. Harry was probably trying to get down, though not as the people at the inquest
decided, down the ladder to get help, to wave down a car to take him to the hospital. I
think it was the way I saw it, that he was going over the quickest way he could, and that’s
why I did what I did, because it was like his last request. He’d almost made it on his
own; I just helped him out the last twenty-two feet.
After I’d done it, I turned around, and there was Otto, his eyes wide. He started to
back away slowly, slowly, and then he turned and ran, slid down the ladder like it was a
pole, and disappeared into the night, like a jackrabbit. I miss him, of course, but I’m glad
he woke up, at least for the moment. There was no point in having the same thing happen
to him. I hope he’s all right wherever he is, but I know there’s no guarantee of that.
The next day dawned clear and bright, the sky a pale blue except for a vapor trail
that had spread out wide and just hung there like the x-ray of a leg. At eight o’clock
Annie came by as usual with our breakfast – some oranges, bread, coffee. She saw the
body right away and dropped the food deep into the snow, then looked up at me, curious.
“Are you alone. Jack?” she asked, and I nodded. “You’ve won!” she giggled.
I smiled at her. “Better go tell them,” I said, and she hurried off, yelling the news
at everyone she happened to see along the way.
65
In an hour, of course, a great crowd had assembled at the foot of the billboard.
The whole town was upset at this terrible tragedy, and everybody blamed the radio
station. They were quick top cover their ass with my story, claiming that they could
hardly be responsible if a man doesn’t seek proper medical care when he has a terminal
condition, as the autopsy showed. Finally, one of them—it must have been the jackass
who called me up in the first place—came over to me and sighed. He gave me a card for
Faust motors and muttered that I could pick up my prize there whenever I wanted, though
he hoped I understood that under the circumstances they couldn’t have a big unveiling
ceremony like they’d planned. I didn’t say a word, just stared at a point just somewhere
over his head, and finally he just turned in disgust and walked away.
Let’s see, that was almost a year ago. I’ve been up here exactly one year and
seven months; down below, they aren’t even counting this as a world record any more. I
don’t suppose you can even read the billboard too good any more, it’s fading and peeling
so bad. Every so often a big strip of letters tears loose and dives and swoops like a giant
red and white bird that has been wounded, fighting its way through the treetops and
telephone wires, sometimes tearing itself to pieces, before it finally falls in a heap on the
pavement, or else on real windy days, just rolls on toward the horizon. At this rate it
won’t be too long before the ad is completely gone, but underneath there’s another one,
something for whiskey, I think, and then another and another.
Like I said, except for the radio station guys, no one ever really notices me up here
any more, though every once in a while somebody in a beat up car will honk at me as they
pass and raise their fists, which always cracks me up. Of course, for a while people tried
to get me down in all kinds of ways. The radio station tried to offer me not only a mobile
home, but a car too, and a television set, and a stereo system, but I just laughed at every
offer. What did I need all those things for up here? Other people got mad and said I
should be removed by force, that I was an eyesore, which is hilarious. Just take a good
look around, I say, and if your eyes aren’t sore when you’re through, then I guess I’m not
so bad either. Other people said that it hurt them to see me still up here, that it was sad
that I was so beaten down and humiliated that I’d just given up. It was like a suicide, they
said; surely I should come down and get well and try to make a new start.
Well, maybe it sounds to you like their hearts are in the right place, but by now
I’m pretty tired of talk like that. Oh, I’ve already explained about suicide; suicide is
breaking slag and breathing ash in a foundry every day of your life just because somebody
expects you to. Maybe I have gone crazy, or else maybe I’ve gone sane, did you ever
think of that? Make a new start? That’s just it, this is my new start. It’s not a pretty life
in the woods or anything, but it is as isolated. I’ve got the three tents hooked up as one
now, so I feel like I’m living like a king—three whole rooms, one for every time of day, if
I want. In one I’ve got all the paintings and sketches that Otto left behind, like in a
gallery. I’ve looked at them so much by now, I’ve tried a few myself, just to see.
But look, most important, this here billboard, its mine. I figured this life out
myself; if I’m an eyesore, or an example, or a hero to the rest of you down there below,
that’s just fine. But after all I been through figuring out how to live life in just this way, I
don’t see me coming down, not for any reason, not until the very end—do you?…
*
66
The monologist paused, and instead of reaching for the picture of Jackie as it
seemed he was about to, looked right at me. He seemed anxious for a response, hungry
for it.
“No I don’t,” I said. “Pardon me for interrupting—am I interrupting?—but I must
confess I’ve been listening to what you’ve been saying just now, every word. Oh, I
completely understand what you mean. It’s an incredible story—different from the one
I’d read about. I don’t recall there being a death, and I believe it ended with a mobile
home and a car for the two who were left. Oh, I have the clipping somewhere in this
mess. Never mind. I completely agree with you, in principle. Who would dare not
respect your home? But I admit I have a few questions about this, if you don’t mind.
Why are you down here now? Did they finally bring you down by force? Or are you
Otto? I admit I suspected that early on, from your shirt, that is…”
Oh, dearest Jacqueline! How excited I was at that moment. I was speaking so
rapidly I didn’t even think what I might sound like. Finally I noticed his lips were
trembling, fluttering, and I stopped, aghast at the monologist’s face. His narrow eyes
were opened as far as they could go; his lips stopped trembling and hung there parted, as
if in mid-word. He was terrified—of me! I suppose I should have known he would be,
but that just shows you how completely I had been convinced by the power of his voice,
by its total conviction. No doubt he hadn’t spoken to anyone in years, not really, I mean.
The shock must have been horrible, though wonderful too, I would guess, since at last his
dream had come true: Someone had heard him, someone had understood. I knew already
that I’d never leave him alone again.
“It’s all right,” I said soothingly, “I’m a friend. Let’s go outside, shall we? Back
to the pond—I saw you there, did you see me?—we can talk there in peace.”
I quickly gathered up my papers, scraped away from my table and hurried over to
the counter to settle up with Anna. I was smiling broadly, but as soon as I saw her, my
mouth dropped. Anna was waiting for me, her fists jammed into her hips. She was
furious, no doubt at having been circumvented, usurped; at Central Lunch, all stories had
to pass through her and her alone. “Well, you two have certainly been chatting it up over
there,” she snapped.
The moment I heard the way she said “you two” I knew it was all over. But I had
to try, if only to spare the monologist the usual ugly scene. “Anna, please,” I whispered
on his behalf, “Please don’t throw him out. He’s been through so much already, he needs
a place like this. He’s new, Anna, he doesn’t know our ways, but he’ll catch on, I’m
certain he will.”
Well, the fat on Anna’s brow contracted into the meanest looking scowl
imaginable. I took a few steps back to brace myself against the storm that was coming.
“Throw who out?” she strudeled. “Our ways? What ways? What are you? Get out! …
Both of you!”
I stood there for a moment, stunned and sad. Anna Welk was coarse, vulgar—oh,
you would have been embarrassed even to be in her presence—but I loved her
nonetheless, loved her perhaps as much as I did you, dearest Jacqueline, even while she,
like you, was unjustly banishing me from her life. But it was no use arguing, pleading. I
turned around for support, but Mr. Harrah was still missing, poor soul, and John John was
67
staring absently into his coffee. I didn’t blame him for not rushing to my defense; he
couldn’t have saved me if he’d tried. At last I sighed and turned to go. I tried to put on a
sheepish grin to share with the monologist, to put him at ease, you know. Oh, I’d explain
it all later; not to worry, we’d find somewhere else in the wide world to sit and talk,
somewhere just as good. But then I gasped, my hands flew up to my face. Oh dearest
Jacqueline! Why did I take my eye off him, even for an instant? The monologist was
gone!
I started for the door, then noticed the monologist had dropped his garden gloves
near our table. I quickly snatched these up and ran out of Central Lunch—was this really
the end?—never to return. But I wasn’t thinking about that. If I could only find the
monologist, it wouldn’t matter. Outside night was already threatening to fall, and fast.
Oh, dearest Jacqueline, I’ve seen many empty streets in the days since we parted, but never
any as empty as these. I’ve crisscrossed the city like a rat in a labyrinth, scanning the
faceless crowds for a flash of yellow, all the while reciting in my head what I would say to
him when I found him, mumbling it on my lips: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry for
everything. Please come back and let’s start again. I need you!”
Sorry for what? you say, and rightly so. I didn’t do anything wrong, he’s the one
who left me. I was only trying to help the best I could. And as for needing him, what for?
Obviously you haven’t learned much since I left. You shouldn’t ‘need’ anybody.
Oh, please, Jackie, not that again. I’m not in the mood for your traps. I can’t help
it, my head hurts, just let me be. Besides, if the monologist comes back here to the pond,
then I certainly won’t need you any more . . . Oh, forgive me—it’s midnight, or something
like that, and I’m terribly alone, as I always am at this time. Every day it’s the same story:
I rise filled with new possibilities, then just before dusk sink back down to despair, a
solitude so deep and pervasive that I always end up fearing that at last even this, my usual
cycle, has come to an end. But maybe this time it really has. I’m dead tired, but I dare not
sleep, for what if the monologist should return while I was lying here dreaming? Or
maybe that’s all that’s left me, memory and dream, an eternal present; maybe there is the
only place I’ll find him, just as it’s now the only place I really find you. I hope you’ll not
be so cross when you meet him, dearest Jacqueline, I hope you’ll smile and give him a try.
He’s had so little love, he needs a place to rest, someone to listen to him—who doesn’t?
He doesn’t know our ways, but just be patient, give him time. Listen to him, believe him.
Perhaps he’ll surprise you, even you.
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The Secret
Later, when it would be time to make something of it all, Manuel would see the
circle of stone arches veined with roses as none other than the garden gateway he’d
imagined in the opening of “The Diary.” This first published work was a piece of
juvenilia really, but worthwhile in its way, an announcement of better things to come, like
a hot blast of summer in late September means a more vibrant Fall, because then the
leaves will die more slowly. In this first of all first scenes, an adolescent boy finds
himself peering one spring morning through the circular gateway of a rose garden near his
home. He’d scarcely even noticed it before, but now he enters and wanders along its keyhole-shaped path, spellbound by all the magnificent new colors and fragrances. Then at
the far edge of the garden’s grassy lawn he comes upon a marble sculpture of a nude
woman in the throes of despair, weeping into the rough white stone beneath her as though
yearning to get back inside it, her face shrouded by thick, wavy locks, her forearms
chopped just above the wrist.
Dazzled by her tragic beauty, the boy walks slowly around the sculpture,
examining it from every angle, and then spies hidden in the bushes ringing its base a tiny
diary belonging to his sister. Hiding himself in a bower, curiously, one might say
voraciously, he reads all about his sister’s secret loves and lies of passion—and here she
had seemed so pure! Then suddenly he comes upon his own name in the most recent
entry and in this dramatic way learns he is dying of the mysterious disease that had
previously claimed an older brother, whom ironically, the story went, he had been
conceived to replace. The boy reads that his mother has pleaded with the rest of the
family to keep the illness a secret from him; she can’t bear to cast a pall over the little
time he has left—or rather, his sister reflects, their mother can’t bear it herself, so racked
is she with guilt for bringing this soul into the world only to die, “like a butterfly that
flutters out of the cocoon into the spiderweb; when the disease begins its punishing
torments, the taste of life she has given him, the greatest gift she could offer, will seem
like a dose of the most bitter poison.”
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The boy closes the diary in tears but bravely decides to preserve the secret; he
loves his mother dearly and can’t bear to see her suffer; and besides, he’s always had a
sense that his life was evanescent, even somewhat unreal, created in large part to fill a
void. For a year he lives a perfectly radiant life, every day an infinity of sparkling
discoveries the healthy tend to ignore. Ah, there’s a poet in him all right, others say—no,
a priest, the real kind, the kind that heal the sick! And the boy is happy to see his mother
beam at these compliments, and happy himself; only in occasional moments of weakness
does he steal away to the garden to check the progress of his illness, always amazed that
his sister seems to discern his symptoms—the blotched palms, the protruding blood
vessels, the darkening blue around the eyes—a day or two before he himself does.
Finally the boy is taken ill with fever, and though it appears the end has come at
last, on the third day the fever breaks. Bewildered, even somewhat disappointed, the boy
presumes this is but the eye of the storm, and, anxious to get a hint of the torments he will
next have to endure, he sneaks out after midnight to read the diary for what he’s certain
will be the last time ever. There, to his infinite astonishment, he finds that he died in the
middle of the previous night, that the house is loud with grief, and that his little body is
lying in his bed, smothered in roses. In a daze, the boy looks up from his bower and
gazes transfixed toward the sculpture, in front of which he sees, or imagines he sees, his
sister writhing naked like a crab atop one of her lovers, “ . . . her head tilted back in the
moonlight, her face an icy, transparent blue, her lips parting with the silent secret of
creation.”
Thus did Emmanuel Serres announce himself to the world, passing through the
gateway to pure artistic space, to archetype, hosanna in the highest. And so later, when it
was time to make something of it all, he would say, Right, the gateway—of course it was
leading me back to that time, of course it would lead me right back to her. But at the
time, he’d actually been disappointed to come upon the circle of arches veined with roses.
An old fieldhouse used to stand on the site, and Manuel had looked forward to retracing
his familiar paths through it, closing his eyes halfway and pretending he really was back
there in that old time. It was an activity he’d always taken some slightly morbid delight
in, but these days even more so. A few months back he’d parted from his wife of almost
eight years, and to ease the pain of a severance he still didn’t fully understand, he’d taken
to revisiting places from his supposedly happier past, as though to make sure it had really
existed. It was a bit desperate perhaps, but he didn’t think so; he felt that he was merely
getting his bearings and genuinely enjoyed the sensation of putting on his past like an old
jacket. Sometimes, if only for a fraction of a second, the results were astonishing, but
never more so than last month when he returned to that first apartment he and Sara had
shared years before. As he walked down the sidewalk to the back door of the house, he
lowered his lids to blur his vision and said to himself, as though in incantation, I am now
walking home, and there on my right is that old black lab on his pillow, and in the
window that gauzy curtain flecked with tiny red tears, and here is that screen door that
creaks just so, and there— Manuel recoiled; there on the door to his old apartment was
the bright red print of a woman’s lips, and beneath it a hastily scrawled note Sara herself
might have written (as though he were some kind of monster keeping her in!): “Got free.
Goodbye.”
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It was a chilling moment, and Manuel had felt rather sad and even mocked by it.
But afterwards he was strangely elated too; it was a moment that was larger than life,
more like something from one of his fictions, and he’d eagerly recorded the scene in his
notebook (in the third person, of course) where it would sit for years like a bottle of wine
in the cellar, until one day he would pick up the notebook and idly thumb through it,
looking for an idea or image he might be able to use in whatever he was currently
working on, and there this little moment would be, precisely the right thing. And he’d
toss it right in, the moment transformed by the fiction and transforming it too, taking it in
a direction he hadn’t really planned, or had planned unconsciously, planned years ago the
very moment he’d actually come upon that lipstained door . . .
That’s the way Manuel thought. So now, in search of some such electric
moment—or of anything really, the slightest inspiration would do just fine, since for
months now he’d been hopelessly unable to work—he was proceeding backwards to the
time before he’d ever dreamed of Sara, returning to the old university where ten years ago
his artistic vision had first sparked. Unfortunately, however, for the most part this little
excursion had simply bored him. Most of the people he’d have wanted to see had died or
had fled; the desolate coal fields he used to trudge through on misty nights had been
replaced by a fitness center; and now, the old fieldhouse—was there nothing sacred? It
had been a crumbling structure even then, the building in which the university had hidden
all its visual artists (thereby shrewdly minimizing the public outcry should the building
collapse). Manuel had often liked to stroll late at night through the labyrinth of studios
along dirt paths littered with scrawled, dusty fragments of canvasses and broken shards of
pottery. All of the paths led to the building’s prime space, a large circle in the center
raised on a little platform, and on the plane two days ago Manuel had remembered how
the sculptor who had ruled it back then was obsessed with what he’d called the Principle
of Asymmetrical Symmetry. He’d made hundreds of these lumpy clay crosses, the great
trick apparently being to make sure that none of the four stems were the same size or
shape. To make each one “unique,” the artist painted a design in the center; on one he
drew rows of little buttons and called the piece “Computer Jesus.” He couldn’t sculpt the
simplest pair of hands to save his life, but he could make hundreds of these.
One night at four in the morning, delirious from having struggled for hours over a
single sentence of “The Diary,” Manuel couldn’t bear this pathetic masquerade and had
cried out into the empty fieldhouse, “What a con-artist!” He started to laugh and felt
compelled to smash at least one of the ridiculous pieces, but then all at once fell silent.
There, hidden behind a screen, was the sculptor himself, sitting on his high-backed throne
(or was it an electric chair?), peering through the arch of his hands, glowering through
dark brows at the floodlit lump of clay on the pedestal in front of him. The poor young
man was not a fraud but simply trapped in his own web, a prisoner of his own absurd
principle; and so Manuel had bit his lip and passed on by in a respectful silence as one
might through a cemetery, which is likewise heavy with the ponderous weight of
disappointed dreams.
And later Manuel would write, Yes, and that memory too was part of the chain,
because she too had been there that night, watching us both through the doorway, the
decision to leave him for me being made for her. But again, at the time, Manuel was
merely irritated the fieldhouse had been razed, replaced by this absurd gateway (not yet
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the gateway), this circle of stone arches surrounding a dancing fountain and a bronze
sphere—a war memorial of all things.
Manuel shook his head in disgust and passed through the arches to the back
entrance of the old Fortune Student Center, another favorite late-night haunt of his; in
fact, he’d written most of “The Diary” over countless coffees at one of its splintered wood
tables. However, as soon as he entered the building, Manuel at once became lost in a
bright maze of snack bars, television lounges, and video arcades that had been added to
placate that new generation of students, already visible in Manuel’s time but now clearly
dominant, who needed to be surrounded at all times by evidence of mass-production and
flickering attention spans. Even the main room, in the old days alive with talk, with
people trying to figure out as much of the world as their meager experience would allow,
had been taken over by this strange, silent crowd of glazed young men and women
sinking into fat red-orange chairs, gazing up at one or all of the three large, blaring
television screens or at either or both of the electronic message boards trailing clipped red
streamers of news and sports. It was like a crowded hospital ward, an entire generation
receiving intravenous inoculations against any individual thoughts they might have in
those moments when they found themselves unavoidably quiet or alone.
Suddenly overcome by nausea, Manuel lowered his head, steamed out the front
doors, and leaned on an iron railing to steady himself. It had been bound to happen; at
last he’d gone in search of his past and turned up nothing, not even the ghost of an image
he could use in a story. He felt empty, weightless, as though he’d fallen into the hole in
his life and was too exhausted to climb out—perhaps that had been the goal all along, not
to get his bearings, but to bottom out. Manuel breathed a dismal sigh, his gaze fixed on
the pavement. Right, he should just get out of there, go home and do his work, start some
new project entirely—advice he’d given countless times to friends and relatives who had
found themselves in similar situations. He knew it must be good advice because he was
loath to follow it; like everyone, Manuel longed instead for a good miracle, the clouds
breaking open and his life suddenly flooded with crisp new light, and the path ahead clear
and easy to follow. . .
So Manuel didn’t just go home and follow his good advice, but instead looked up
and gazed absently at the many tall pines flecked a startling green by the autumn light,
followed the web of crisscrossing sidewalks, one leading straight across to the old turret
he’d lived and worked in for a couple of years; and before he knew it Manuel had fallen
under the dreamy spell he’d been hoping for, thinking, I am standing here between
classes. In a second I'll turn and meet Rosa and we'll have coffee and then maybe take a
walk by the pond so I can tell her my new story.
Manuel smiled to himself, turned and looked up—well, they hadn’t changed the
facade at least, the stone relief of a pair of smiling sphinxes that looked more like puppies
by the fire, nor those wide splintering castle doors. And so to prolong the illusion as long
as possible, Manuel quickly took hold of the door handle—and here is that old brass loop
with the crack down the center—and re-entered the lounge.
It worked much better to come in this way, through his usual entrance. Manuel
stood in the center of the place and beneath all the garish changes recognized a great deal
more of the old layout—to the left, the arched window through which the afternoon
sunrays poured in a gauzy stream; straight ahead, the atrium bathed in a sea green glow;
72
to the right, the fading portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Fortune they’d always laughed about in
the old days, they were so badly done, making the philanthropists look like they were
harboring some awful family secret, and between them there she was, the end of the long,
twisting thread I'd been following for months, elevated above the crowd on a wooden
stool as though to make sure I wouldn’t miss her!
Or so he would write; but at the time Manuel was simply stunned; in fact, he was
sure he was mistaken. For a moment he stood gazing at the woman, trying desperately to
make the pieces fit, yet at the same time taking them apart: the hair was right, thick curly
brown strands, though considerably shorter than he’d known them; the pale skin tone too,
but since the woman was bent over reading a book, most of her face was obscured. But
then someone was trying to step through the anaesthetized crowd without spilling his
coffee, and the woman on the stool sensed this and looked up from her book, and the way
she smiled, got up to give the stranger more room to pass, even helped him with one of
the cups though in transition a little coffee splashed over the rim and burned her hand—in
short, the way she cheerfully obliged—no, there was no denying it now, the woman was
none other than Rosa Keyes.
. . . as though I'd willed her into being, he’d write later, but still Manuel hesitated
a moment, for how did one approach a miracle? He drifted around her in a wide loop like
someone suspiciously eyeing a waxwork in a museum, then finally crept up behind. He
stood one last moment staring at the familiar earthy beauty of her face and hair—was she
real?—then at last reached out and gave her shoulder a gentle tap.
Rosa whirled, there was an instant of something that seemed close to terror, and
then she recognized Manuel and beamed, as though she too had anticipated this chance,
had longed for it for years. They embraced, they began to talk in rapid little bursts; both
found it necessary to verify at once just how remarkable this coincidence was. It was the
first time she’d come back here too, she said; Moira had dragged her up—did he
remember Moira? They were just talking about him not one hour ago, about everybody
in the old crowd really, making a map of where they all were, where their vectors had
shot them—wasn’t that how Manuel had always put it?—and thinking maybe it might be
time to get together . . .
Manuel nodded and smiled, said he supposed that’s why he was here, then trailed
off. Their initial outbursts had subsided, and the moment seemed about to be flooded
with an equal and opposite silence. But Manuel swiftly dammed it up, asked Rosa what
she was reading.
Rosa averted her eyes, laughed in embarrassment, and held up a book that was
currently very popular—a lively, quirky novel filled with zany grotesques and maybe half
a point. Manuel didn’t hate it. Oh, just this dumb thing, she said. It was kind of funny,
not nearly as good as what he was doing, of course. She’d liked Manuel’s stories, by the
way, though some of them were a little . . .
“Hard,” he said with a weary smile. He’d heard that a thousand times and still
wasn’t sure whether he should be flattered, annoyed, or depressed.
Rosa smiled back, then thought a moment. Well, his characters were so isolated,
she said, so abstract, the settings so harsh and barren; it was like everybody was trapped
in a model of the world! But the stories were obviously good. “The Diary” was still her
favorite, maybe because it was a little softer, more like a fairy tale, or maybe because
73
she’d been there when it was written, already knew what it was all about, so it seemed
more real to her. The novel was impressive too, though she confessed she hadn’t had
time to finish it yet; that is, she wanted to give it the time it deserved, and . . . .
Manuel smiled halfway, a little hurt. He remembered how once their relationship
had almost come to an absurd end when Rosa had confessed lightly (as though it didn’t
matter!) that she sometimes skipped the descriptive passages in stories and novels. “You
do what?!” he’d shouted incredulously—he’d had a rather frustrating day at work, the
worst kind, sweating over a passage he couldn’t get right because he knew as yet it lay
beyond his powers. “They're the most important part!” But it was impossible to be the
slightest bit angry with her now; the best, the freshest, part of their old childish intimacy
had washed over them both like a fine mist, and every glance, every word, seemed to
glisten with it.
And the wind blew, and this blessed little cloud of two tumbled out of the
anesthesia ward and settled in a corner of the basement lounge, which was almost empty
because it was still under reconstruction and as yet featured much less to plug into.
Manuel and Rosa had coffee and breathlessly filled in the years since they’d last seen
each other with the bare outlines of their lives. Rosa said it had taken a while but she was
finally content with her life. She’d taken a job as a Case Worker with the state Human
Services Dept., dealing mostly with cases of abuse and neglect; it was difficult to take
such a heavy dose of reality every day, but she wasn’t yet burned out and was determined
not to be. She got married a couple of years ago to a man named Peter, who managed a
video store. They’d bought a little house not too far from her parents in Rockford and
were very happy. She had a picture if Manuel were interested, she’d brought it up to show
Moira.
Manuel looked at the photo—Christmas by the tree, big smiles; Rosa’s arms were
hooked loosely around Peter, like a life preserver around a buoy. Peter was a somewhat
slight, cheerful-looking man with a neat brown beard and glasses.
Manuel smiled, said he seemed like a nice guy. Then suddenly it was his turn:
right, the rumor Rosa had heard was true, he too was married, to a woman named Sara.
“But I don't have any evidence,” he said with a wry smile.
“Sara Serres?” Rosa laughed, and Manuel nodded, suppressed a grimace. His last
name was the first thing Sara had shed three years ago, who could blame her? Manuel
hadn’t cared one way or another and had even suggested half in jest that as long as she
was changing her name for the sake of identity, it seemed a pity for her simply to
reassume the last name of her father, whom she despised; if he were her, Manuel had
said, he’d make up something new. “But I’m not you,” she’d said coolly. He might have
heard more in that tone had there been any real reason to.
“Sara Stone actually,” Manuel said and paused. He considered telling Rosa his
situation, but it was such a long story, and he didn’t feel up to it. Besides, it didn’t seem
to him that that was what this meeting, this developing story here, was all about, not yet
anyway. They were both still trembling with the charge of this remarkable coincidence,
dissolving the boundaries of time and space, plunging them into the sea-changed reality
of lyric and symbol, and all at once Manuel was possessed by a sense of urgency. He
glanced up at the clock, which read three. Rosa had said she was meeting Moira here at
five, and that then they were going out to dinner with Moira’s family. Two hours then.
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Manuel downed the last of his coffee and suggested why break with the original plan?
that they go for a walk by the pond.
Rosa laughed—she’d just had exactly the same idea!—and at once they swept out
of the Student Center and into the bright autumn afternoon. There was no question which
way to go; at once they simply stepped onto the familiar path that headed right to
Manuel’s old turret room, then curved around and picked up the path to the pond, and
then around the pond as before, around the whole campus as always and ever, completely
absorbed in that still, balmy quality that coated one’s perceptions like a clear film as soon
as one passed through the university’s gates, so that it was inconceivable that just beyond
that dense grove, those grassy links, lay a squalid city throbbing with corruption and
blight.
Manuel and Rosa began their walk by exchanging the chapters they’d missed in
the lives of mutual friends, but as the dreamy quality of the place gradually took hold of
him, Manuel found himself drifting out of this conversation and into another that he now
knew lay just ahead, becoming clearer and louder as they drew ever closer to it, like the
screams from a distant carnival. The conversation was going to happen, there was simply
no way around it; it was no doubt the whole point of this fantastic coincidence, this hole
in the fabric of time into which they’d fallen . . .
Because during their last six months together something very disturbing had
happened to Rosa, and a result to Manuel too, something he’d never understood. All of a
sudden, as though somewhere behind the scenes a switch had been thrown, Rosa had
fallen through a deep hole in her psyche and couldn’t for the life of her get herself out.
She’d stopped eating, cried in torrents, and lived in constant dread of becoming possessed
by attacks of fear so paralyzing she could scarcely breathe. At first, Manuel had tried to
get her to talk it out with him—Yes, right here once by this old battered oak—but she
wouldn’t or couldn’t, he never knew which. At times it seemed she didn’t want him
anywhere near her, yet other times she clung to him like a child unable to swim grips the
ladder at the edge of the deep end. By coincidence, her first attack had come the day after
he’d finished “The Diary,” and as a result he’d always wondered if he’d had anything to
do with her condition. She always reassured him that he certainly wasn’t the cause, but
then at times when her disorder flared up and she sought to wound him or anyone near,
she’d cry out just the opposite, that it was all his fault, him and his depressing stories!
Manuel had never been more confused in his life. He and Rosa, deeply familiar
with one another for nearly three years, had begun creeping around one another like total
strangers, both looking out of the corners of their eyes for the slightest clues that would
tell them not only what the other was thinking, but what they themselves were thinking.
Meanwhile, Manuel had accepted a job in New York, and though when he’d applied he’d
rather hoped and even expected Rosa would come along, that was out of the question
now, it couldn’t even be discussed. But Manuel found this mere drifting away intolerable
and so just before he was about to leave, he’d made a rather desperate, awkward attempt
to get Rosa to draw some definite lines over their blurry situation. At the end of their
friends Steve and Christine’s wedding reception, Manuel and Rosa found themselves
dancing the last dance, or to be more precise, found themselves on the dim edge of the
floor locked in a silent swirl, slowing down despite the music (what music?), approaching
a complete inertia into which they would simply disappear but never quite reaching it—
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even this release seemed to elude them. Manuel began to feel an acute vertigo, and
before he’d even thought of what he was doing, he’d said quietly, as though to prove he at
least was still alive, “Shouldn't we do this?”
He’d often thought of that question later—was that supposed to be a proposal?
God knows what he’d have said or done if she’d said yes! But there was no danger of
that; instead Rosa had merely hushed him, looked away, and whispered into his shoulder,
“Don't say it.”
So now as they walked that balmy circuit around the college, Manuel understood
that it was time for those old questions to be asked and answered directly this time. They
were nearly ten years older now, more aware of themselves, more articulate; surely Rosa
could at last reveal what had happened back then, could at last express what it was she’d
been thinking, and then he could say what he’d been thinking, and together they could
assemble a coherent mosaic of their past, but for the sake of our present too, our new
intimacy developing right then, which would rise to new heights because freed from the
relentless pressure of the physical. Meanwhile Rosa, with uncanny precision, was
hovering near the subject like a hummingbird, talking merrily about Moira and Ben now,
and Manuel nodded, staring hard at those fluttering lips, as though Rosa held the keys not
only to my past confusion but to my present, and as soon as she paused he stepped into the
void and lifted the first veil.
“What was it like for you, after I finally left for New York?” he asked, then added
quickly, determined to be clear. “We spoke for six months, but . . . didn’t speak.”
Rosa averted her eyes, then smiled vaguely and nodded—right, she’d glossed over
that whole time. Well, there were some pretty painful years in there; several times—once
last year, in fact—she’d tried to write him the whole story of everything that had
happened, but each time she’d broken down in tears in the middle and thrown the letter
out. . . .
Rosa trailed off, and Manuel rushed in to prop her up. “Can you talk about it
now?”
Rosa paused, then gave a light shrug. Sure, she’d learned to, there was no other
way. Then all at once she looked at Manuel and smiled. “But I'm afraid you’d put it in a
book.”
Manuel groaned. During that last chaotic year, she’d sometimes dodged his
questions this way. Also, it was the last thing she’d ever said to him at the end of that
awful telephone conversation in which he told her he’d moved in with Sara. Rosa’s
violent tears in response had stunned him, since for months after he’d left she’d seemed
so cold and distant he’d thought sure she’d found someone else to lean on. Finally, in
parting she begged him to promise her one last thing—please never, never to put her in a
book. Manuel had shrugged, said okay—one of the easier promises he’d ever made, he’d
thought, since Rosa’s life had never really struck him as all that interesting as a story,
probably not even if he’d known the precise origin of her disorder. The great irony was
that he already had used a few pieces of her—that wry crinkle at the corner of her mouth;
her slender hands like trowels—for the sister in “The Diary,” and she hadn't even noticed!
Likewise, the keyhole-shaped rose garden itself was in part a play on her name, a little
gift he’d hidden in the text for her, but again which she’d never spied.
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So in truth Rosa’s anxiety that her life would be laid bare in one of his stories had
always struck him as absurd and even a little embarrassing. But now, the both of them
still glistening in the mist of their intimacy, both old and new, Manuel simply laughed it
off. It just didn't work that way, he explained cheerfully, not for him anyway. For
instance, that secretary in the novel, Connie, had a basis in reality—Kelly or something,
maybe Cathy—but only when the character was on the verge of dying out of the book did
he realize, through a single image he used to describe her, that all that time he’d really
been writing about his sister, that in part he was playing out a fantasy . . .
Manuel paused; he feared he was losing Rosa in all this talk, so he shook his head
and aborted his psychoanalysis. “The point is,” he said, “neither the real inspiration for
the character nor my sister would ever recognize themselves in this Connie, who was at
once like both and like neither, who existed in some other realm entirely and—”
“People would know,” Rosa broke in with a skeptical smile.
Manuel rolled his eyes and grinned, then threw his arms out wide. “Well, don't
you want to be immortal?”
Rosa gave a short laugh, then pursed her lips that wry crinkle at the corner and
shook her head. “No.”
Manuel fell silent, forced a smile. They'd completed their circuit and were
approaching the circle of stone arches, incredibly not even then seeing the place for all it
was, the gateway of The Diary overlapping the very spot where we’d met, our vectors
adding up to zero, where they drifted to a stop and sat down on one of the stone benches
just inside. He shrugged and said quickly that anyway all that was neither here nor there,
since he had no desire to write a story about her secrets. Isolated characters, remember?
Trapped in a model of the world. That was very good by the way; obviously she hadn't
lost her knack for coming up with clever phrases like that, and without even trying! No,
forget the stories, he said; it was for the sake of the present they should talk about the
past—surely she too felt the same way.
Rosa gazed into the babbling fountain, then nodded. “Maybe, but it was very
painful . . .” she said and took a deep breath, the first words of her secret welling up
behind her lips, the levee cracking.
But just then they were interrupted by a loud cackle just behind them. It was
Moira. “Look at this. It’s like a bad movie.”
“You're early,” Rosa said. She was right; it was only four.
Moira laughed. “Looks to me I’m just in time.”
Manuel forced a smile and greeted her. Rosa’s friend Moira had never really
liked him all that much, or if she did she’d had an odd way of showing it. Whenever she
used to see him, she would laugh and shout out something absurd like, “Shield your eyes!
The Artist has emerged transfigured!” Moira was a lawyer now; some fates were
unbearably inexorable.
Rosa stood up in a bit of a daze and suggested faintly that maybe she and Manuel
should get together for lunch the next day, but Manuel shook his head, said his flight left
tomorrow at dawn. (“At dawn!” Moira laughed). Rosa nodded; she was driving back
tomorrow as well. (“At dusk!” Moira laughed). Manuel shrugged, and after an awkward
pause, he and Rosa scribbled out their addresses, but joylessly now, like traffic cops
writing out tickets. After the exchange was completed, Rosa said cheerfully that maybe
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that get-together of their friends would really happen now that they’d received this boost,
maybe just before New Year’s in Chicago, where most of them lived—how did that
sound?
Manuel said he wouldn't miss it, then sighed and said, “Well
. . . ” and embraced Rosa one last time briefly but as though there were nothing else in
the world, because how do you let go of a miracle? and Rosa backed away flushed, so she
saw it too now, and called out after him that maybe she’d try to call him at his hotel after
dinner, maybe then they could finish their talk.
*
Manuel grabbed something to eat and went straight back to his hotel. Feeling more
animated than he had in months, maybe even in years, he got out his notebook and
recorded the whole scene with Rosa, and that was when it all made sense, when every
piece fell into place: the garden gateway, the fieldhouse memory, the two passages
through the Fortune Center, a twisting path to the subterranean world of pure meaning,
truer than true, in which his stories too are submerged, and out of which they arise. Even
Moira’s apparently annoying interruption made sense now, because Rosa hadn't been quite
ready to reveal herself just then, not entirely, and now when she called she would be.
So Manuel spent the next several hours writing and staring at the walls, carefully
laying out the series of questions he would ask her and occasionally glaring at the phone,
as though to squeeze a ring out of it. Finally at eight o’clock he noticed the red light on
his phone was on. He picked up the receiver Hello? Hello? but there was no one on the
other end. He phoned the desk, but the clerk said there hadn’t been any calls. From that
point on, the hours dripped by like a water torture. Manuel passed the time discovering
still more startling connections and meanings buried in his chance encounter with Rosa
and scribbling them in the margins of what he’d already composed; but at last he grew
impatient with waiting for the next scene to begin and tossed the notebook aside. He
paced around his cage, cursed Moira, and shook his head at Rosa—how could she let this
chance slip away? But still he waited, recalling the promise in that last embrace. He
never really gave up, but around two o’clock his body began to cave in to fatigue, and not
long thereafter Manuel faded off into the dreamless sleep of the forgotten.
On the plane the next day, unforeseen delays and re-routings absurdly taking him
west before he could go east, Manuel sipped coffee after coffee, reread his notebook
pages of the night before, gazed out the window at the endless film rolling backwards, at
the porous, marbled skin of the great lake, a curve of hips, at the harvested fields, the
people in Minnesota farm in labyrinths and spirals, then flipped to a new page, and began
a letter to Rosa. He wrote that he was sorry they hadn’t had a chance to speak again that
night (right, don’t be vexed now) if only because now he felt in a bit of a swirl,
disoriented by both the iridescent coincidence and its too-soon fading. In any case, it was
worth catching a glimmer of their old intimacy even for a little while, worth it even just to
see her handwriting again on the slip of paper she’d given him! He hoped (strike that)
felt certain that they would resume their conversation if and when the planned reunion
took place later this year—perhaps sooner if she liked, by phone or letter. Incidentally,
she shouldn’t feel that she alone was on the spot here; he too had glossed over a few
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things about the intervening years which were worth telling, if she were interested in
hearing them (oh, that alone should do the trick). He closed that he was anxious to meet
Peter (an important inoculation against any suspicions that Manuel sought to threaten
their happy home) and hoped (strike that) looked forward (strike that) was anxious to hear
from her soon. And then of course, a postscript, a kind of signature, a personal little
gift—found this and thought of you: The people in Minnesota farm in labyrinths and
spirals.
Manuel read the letter over a few times and found it perfectly answerable,
passionate but sane. He posted it as soon as they landed in Minneapolis—how strange to
leave behind such an important little piece of himself in a place that didn’t even really
exist except in the rarefied time and space of air travel, a place connected to the familiar
world below by only the faintest filaments, like this little blue box. It seemed an ideal
place to continue his sublime correspondence with Rosa, and delay after delay Manuel sat
watching this wide, crisscrossing world people in Minnesota are tall and read Canoe
magazine cover to cover with a powerful sense of belonging.
However, once on the plane pointed properly east this time, propelling him
relentlessly home now, Manuel began to feel the whole dreamy hour with Rosa draining
from his head like blood after a hot bath. He went over the meeting again and again, and
for the first time saw some of the flaws in the performance, cursed himself for wasting so
much time in idle chatter, cursed Moira. True, their renewed intimacy was powerful—
sharp traces of it lingered even now—but he couldn’t help but fear the moment was gone
and could never be revived. He might sustain the vision, it was essential to him—but
would Rosa? And the more Manuel confronted the probability that she wouldn’t, the
more strenuously did he attempt to deny it, until at last, back home in his empty
apartment, surrounded by all those familiar objects which serve to fortify oneself against
plagues of uncertainty precisely like this one, Manuel felt the greater portion of his
concern sink into the mud of a forced detachment—Well, it was all out of his hands now
anyway, and so what if that’s all there was to it, what real difference did it make? A
posture which he knew from experience would harden and leave him sluggish and
disinterested for at least a couple of weeks.
But two days later, when he saw the strip of red through the slit in his mailbox,
that thick crust began to crack away like a plaster cast. Rosa’s letter was unsealed, as
though mailed in haste before she could change her mind, and was clearly written in haste
as well. Her familiar scrawl fanned out wide like the ridges of a seashell, riding a high
wave up the page, then leveling off and plunging to the lower right corner.
The letter began with a little cloudburst: “I feel like my arm was cut off and the
bleeding wasn’t stopped!” Then it ebbed a bit, lightly scolding him for not having
returned her call. She wrote that after she’d phoned the hotel and found that he wasn’t in,
she’d gone on a crazy search of all the old places. Each time she was sure she’d find him,
and one time she thought she had, sitting alone on his usual stool at the Apollo. She’d
crept up behind and almost tapped him on the shoulder, but just in time she saw he was
an impostor.
“. . . So there was no fateful meeting again,” Rosa concluded, “I guess we used up
our fate quota earlier. Still, I’m a little surprised you didn’t call. But I already said that.
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Well, my thinking’s not too clear in the present. It’s two in the morning and I’m starting
to fade. Hopefully our New Year’s plan will become a reality, so that we can talk again.”
As Manuel read the letter, the cast of his detachment fell away in big chunks, so
that by the end his connection to Rosa seemed even more fresh and smooth, even more
vibrant and new, than it had three days ago. Of course, he cursed the hotel for such an
obscene mistake, as if they’d conspired against him—such outrageous incompetence, they
ought to be sued! But then just as quickly he turned his attention to the present, to the
main point—which was that Rosa could sustain the vision, they could get that moment
back. And at once he dashed off another letter, this time rather less restrained, matching
her emotion—yes, yes, the bleeding unstaunched, the thinking unclear “in the present,” he
felt precisely the same way! And as for the fate quota, well, the gods were just making
them work for it now, apparently they found this sort of thing amusing on Olympus.
Certainly, they’d meet again, just tell him when and where; but until then maybe they
should begin the conversation right away, maybe they should start with what they would
have said that night.
Manuel sent the letter off and thought with immense satisfaction that Rosa was
probably reading his first letter now too, that maybe she’d already begun to answer it.
And if she happened to break down in the middle, this second one would arrive and
provide the spark she might need to finish it this time, to finish it and send it off. Manuel
looked at the calendar and smiled—right, Wednesday of next week. Rosa would
remember that it was his birthday, she was always good at that sort of thing, and that
would provide still one more spark, and Wednesday of next week it would come.
But that Wednesday passed, and now Manuel was thirty-one, let the countdown
begin. Then the next Wednesday ticked by, and the next, and Manuel fought his anxiety
with the vain hope that once again some twist of fate had intervened, that the letter had
been lost or that Rosa had misplaced his address, except he knew that letters just didn't
get lost and that if anybody really wanted to find him it wasn’t hard at all. Finally, it was
mid-November, the trees were stripped bare, icy grains of snow were spitting through his
window, and Manuel had crusted over so hard with contrived indifference he could barely
breathe. Rosa’s phone number wasn’t listed, but look how easy it was to track down, and
after a few days, giving her one last chance, he made the call that he dreaded to make,
because it meant that he was no longer living and breathing inside that shimmering
moment of connection, but was instead giving the first kick to its lifeless body.
When Rosa realized it was Manuel on the other end, she wrapped her voice in
cheerful clear plastic. She apologized for not getting in touch; she’d been real busy at
work, and besides, she didn’t have all the details yet about the New Year’s gathering.
Manuel gave a light scoff (as if their intimacy had anything to do with “work” or
“plans!”), and Rosa picked up on his vexation and made a vague joke about it; and all at
once it was like old times all right, the bad times just after he’d left for New York—the
long silences, the constant misunderstandings, the speaking without speaking. Finally
Manuel began to close the door, said he wasn’t sure he could make it out to Chicago
anyway; he too was busy with work, and the cost, you know, it was a little extravagant.
But suddenly Rosa insisted that he had to come; everybody was expecting him, he was
the main attraction, him and Sara too.
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While this soothed him somewhat, it wasn't enough. Manuel was determined not
to go until Rosa showed the slightest hint of that reawakened tone of a month before.
And perhaps she sensed this, because a few days later he received a note from her saying
it was all set now and please, please come. Manuel was still reluctant, but then at last he
decided what the hell, he might as well play it out to the end; besides, he didn’t have
anything better to do over the holidays, didn’t have anything at all to do, in fact, for the
first time in eight years.
So on the twenty-ninth of December, Manuel flew to Chicago. Winter lay spread
out below in pages etched with jagged black and white symbols he didn’t even try to
decipher, because Manuel had no thoughts on the way, not even this one, it was as though
they’d all been drained out of him. It was just after ten when he landed. Rosa and Peter
were staying at her sister’s, and since Rosa had given Manuel the number, he phoned, just
in case. But her voice was in that awful plastic again—have a good time, it said, they’d
see him tonight at The Terrace.
Manuel shrugged; he didn’t feel much like talking to anyone anyway. He
preferred to disappear into the city streets, the colorful holiday delusion just starting to
lift. He fell in step with the crisscrossing crowd, their breaths shooting from their mouths
in little forked bursts of white fire, then peeled off and stood alone by the vast lake and
stared up at the smooth, blanched sky. Sometimes all at once a patch of gray palmed the
one bright hole in the clouds, and in the next instant the city was hidden behind billowing
veils of snow, the whole skyline reduced to a filmy silhouette, a cardboard cut-out. But
then just as suddenly the trick was over and the curtains vanished; the familiar details reemerged, but brighter now, coated with a slick, shiny skin.
This happened seven or eight times, and each time Manuel felt a little more in
equilibrium with the haze, with the vanishing, so that at some point during his day-long
wandering he more or less forgot about the gathering of his old friends; in a way, it was
inconceivable that he would have any reason at all to be at any particular spot on the
planet at a particular time. So it was either by mere chance or unconscious direction that
Manuel ended up pausing to stare at one window as though the name shining on it in a
wide arc were something vaguely familiar from long ago, until at last he was distracted by
something flickering inside, some wild waving at one of the tables; and out of all those
red-orange arms and faces one face broke loose and floated right up to the glass.
“This is it!” the face said, smiling. “We’re all here.”
Manuel wiped the window clear of his breath, but the face had disappeared to his
right. Manuel pressed his hands and forehead against the glass and peered in after it, but
just then the face poked out the door. “Manuel? Are you all right?”
The face was paler in the cold night air. Manuel stared at it until the image
burned through the icy glaze that had formed over his eyes. “Rosa!” he said suddenly, as
though about to ask, “What are you doing here, in my dream?”
Rosa laughed and led Manuel to the door, and as soon as he stepped inside, the
little crowd at the table erupted in a loud cheer. Manuel greeted these faces from his past
as best he could, his head swimming, spiraling, like an ice cube in a cup of hot tea. An
awkward pause threatened; something wasn’t quite right. Then George said, “Manuel,
you realize you’re almost blue!” George was a doctor now.
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Manuel smiled, rushing to rewire the circuitry, making a conscious effort not to be
a lunatic. “Well, it’s cold,” he said dryly, then did what everyone was hoping he’d do in
order to prove beyond a doubt he was sane—he ordered a shot of whiskey. Finally
everyone relaxed into laughter, poking fun at his strange entrance. Well, Manuel always
was more eccentric than they were, they said; he was the real thing after all, the rest of
them were just in disguise, playing in that old fieldhouse sandbox! Then those few who
had managed to make it all the way through Emmanuel Serres’ literary corpus—gluttons
for punishment, they called themselves—began to compliment him, asked him how he'd
come up with this or that character, and by the way why hadn’t he ever used any of them?
After another drink Manuel had almost completely thawed, almost felt warm and loved
among these old forgotten friends, God bless us every one. And Diane took a good look
at him and said it was amazing but Manuel was the only one of them who looked exactly
the same as he had before.
“That’s cause he was frozen!" said Rich, who sold real estate and was very fat
now; and Christine said, “No, he's got a portrait he keeps hidden at home.” Only Moira
disagreed, zeroing in on him through the curls of her cigarette smoke. “He’s lost weight,”
she said, then smiled and added quickly, “But I want to hear about this wife. Where is
this mystery woman?”
Manuel laughed; the whiskey was going right to his head, and he said the first
thing that came into it. “She’s working,” he said, smiling at Moira. “She was an actress,
and now she’s a microbiologist. She’s writing a book about parasites.”
To Manuel’s surprise, everyone roared. Steve explained that just before Manuel
had come, Pete here was talking about the people he works with, one of whom always
said when she got flustered . . .
“You’re all a bunch of parasites!” Peter squeaked and bounced in imitation,
“You’re all just a bunch of goddamn parasites!” Everyone laughed at the reprise, and
Peter took the stage again and continued his stories about work and all the zany characters
who came in and out—it was like a TV show, he said. Manuel watched the performance
through the filmy scrim of whiskey slowly covering his eyes. Peter was pretty hard to
dislike; he was one of those easily contented, comfortable men who seemed to glide
through life without a care in the world, without a single ambition, the kind who
sometimes got a little tired, but never angry, because for what? He didn’t like the video
store, but he could laugh about it; it didn’t matter, none of it did. And his stories, his
voices, were mostly very funny; anyway, everyone was laughing at them, was adding to
them with stories of their own.
But Rosa—Manuel leaned back and tried not to stare—was that really Rosa Keyes
sitting there next to Peter, the happy hostess of this gathering, blithely coaxing her
husband on and on through stories she’d heard thousands of times? Yes, she’d always
been obliging, but where was that other side of her—that harder edge, that searching,
inscrutable glance? Manuel was baffled by the change and was almost convinced, but
then suddenly he saw her break out of character for just an instant, saw her eyes darken to
those familiar unfathomable depths and her lips part as though she were about to bite
something. And she must have realized it had happened, because all at once she looked
up at Manuel with startled eyes and resumed her character. Manuel turned away,
swallowed the last of his drink and got up to order another.
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When he returned, everyone had broken into twos and threes, and the only seat
open was the one next to Rosa. Almost immediately Peter rose and announced he was
leaving. He was sort of tired and it was a long drive back tomorrow; he had to be at the
video store by nine. Waving off the group’s pleas that he stay on at least another day—
no, really, it was impossible, this was the store’s busiest season—he shook hands all
around, Happy New Year, then kissed his wife good-bye, and left the bar.
After a brief pause, the little circle closed up again in laughter and conversations.
Christine said something to Rosa about what a sweet guy Peter was, and Rosa smiled and
nodded; then after taking a slow sip of water, as though counting One, Two, Three . . . she
slowly turned around and confronted Manuel.
Manuel smiled; at once he saw that this little moment had been prearranged.
Right, Moira had moved so that he would sit here—how artless they were. Out of spite
he almost withdrew from the scene, almost turned to join George and Steve, who were
making a list of the limbs and appendages missing from people who had been brought
into their emergency rooms, almost an entire body’s worth. But maybe Manuel thought
he might as well get it all over with, or maybe he still thought there was hope—Manuel
was cursed with a bottomless reservoir of hope—because finally he just shrugged and
stayed right on his mark, told Rosa that Peter seemed like a nice guy.
Rosa smiled and said he was, then paused, took another sip, and got right to the
point. She said she was sorry she hadn’t written or called; she had been busy at work, but
besides that, well, she’d finally decided it was better to let the past go, not to reopen those
closed doors.
Manuel took a deep breath. It was a relief at long last to see the thing on the table,
though it was but the disfigured corpse of their vibrant moment in October, and he wasted
no time in calmly slicing it to pieces. He said of course he understood how she might feel
that way, but the point was those doors were never really opened to begin with; they were
just walls around the truth. Their relationship always had a big hole right in the center of
it, like an elaborate frame without a painting. In his view they’d been given a remarkable
opportunity, a gift—was it possible Rosa had forgotten the incredible coincidence of their
meeting? Now that was a door, the hardest of all to break down, the door of time and
space—and here it was opened for them, as though by magic, or as though by the
intensity of their desires to make it happen. It seemed a shame, no a crime, not to walk
through it, to just run the other way and hide.
“Because this isn't just about filling in the past,” Manuel concluded with a light
shrug. “The intimacy is still there. We can’t help that, we can’t deny it—but why should
we want to? It’s a shame to dilute an intimacy; there are so few people in life one has this
kind of feeling for.”
“That's just it,” Rosa said somberly. “I don’t think I can have this kind of feeling
for more than one person.”
Manuel eyed her suspiciously. “You mean you can’t, or Peter doesn’t want you to?”
Rosa sighed. “Both.”
Manuel paused, glanced toward the door. So Peter did have a care in the world—
well, he too was doomed then. Manuel finished his glass, rubbed his sweating brow. He
was fairly drunk now and so felt as though the moment were pulling him along on a sheet
of ice. “I’m no threat,” he said wearily.
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“I know,” Rosa said. “But I’d just feel uncomfortable telling you things I only tell
him now. I’d feel I was being . . . emotionally unfaithful.”
Manuel glared back at Rosa in bewilderment, as though she’d just spoken in a
language he didn’t understand. He wanted to laugh and shout, “What utter nonsense!”
but he restrained himself and simply shook his head. “It’s a mistake to hide all your
emotions in one person,” he said, “It doesn’t work; one day they just explode in your face.
I know. I’ve done it too.”
Manuel looked around the table, saw Moira talking to Diane but keeping one of
her large, black eyes fixed at all times on the two of them. He turned back to Rosa and
smiled faintly. “Sara’s gone,” he whispered. “It's a long story.” Manuel flicked his hand
through the space between them, as though to say, There, I've started, it’s your turn now.
Rosa was stunned and cast her eyes down to the table. She picked up his secret as
though it were a playing card she needed for her hand, stared hard at it a moment, then
shook her head and laid it back down; it was too late, her hand had changed. “I'm sorry,”
she said softly, as though from an immense distance. “It must be very painful. I’m sorry
I can’t do more.”
Manuel recoiled; he was lying there at the bottom of a well, and Rosa had simply
turned and walked away, leaving him for dead. “But you can!” he called after her.
“Maybe it’s hard, but so what, the worthwhile things are always hard. If you want to, you
can, and you do want to. Don’t even try to deny it, Rosa. I was there, too.”
Rosa’s mouth began to quiver, and as he knew from countless moments in the
past that this meant the dam was breaking, Manuel softened his tone. “It’s just that . . .
we’re bigger than these barriers—”
“No, you’re bigger than these barriers,” Rosa broke in. “Oh, I know you’re right,
Manuel, you’re always right, it’s your job to be right—I mean that, it’s where you live!
But the rest of us don’t even try to get it ‘right,’ we just do the best we can. You always
thought I was more than I really was, and you almost convinced me. I almost became that
person.”
Rosa paused and stared at her slender, slightly trembling hands, as though not sure
even now if they were hers. Then slowly she turned and saw that a couple of the others
had started to notice the scene. At once she shuddered, stood up, and informed the
gathering that it was time for her to go.
So now it was her turn to make the rounds of farewell, and Manuel watched her in
awe, wondering how on earth she could possibly be smiling and laughing and embracing
people, wishing them a Happy New Year, as though nothing were happening here. Then
it was his turn, and Rosa smiled and did the same to him. What a bizarre performance!
Was she really convinced that she was this person now, this blithe woman who could shut
off her desires like a faucet? Manuel watched her wave and smile her way out the door,
out of his life for good, then glanced over at Moira, who was not laughing at him now,
but seemed almost sympathetic—and somehow this was even more intolerable. Outside,
still more transparent veils of snow were falling over the city, draping themselves in silent
waves against the front window of The Terrace. Suddenly Manuel had a vision of the
man they all must have seen outside and panicked.
No farewells from him, no hugs, no happy new years. Manuel bolted outside, saw
a brown blotch disappearing behind the veils, and ran out after it. When he caught it, he
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grabbed its arm, and it shrieked and then forced a laugh. “What are you doing?” it said.
Ah, so it had been crying some.
Manuel pointed toward a patch of red shining faintly through the gauze just ahead.
“We're going into that cafe,” he said playfully—he vaguely remembered that when all
else failed this approach often did the trick. “I’m going to tell you my sad story, and then
you’re going to tell me yours, and then we’re going to live happily ever after.”
Rosa tried to laugh, but then she looked at his face with alarm, tore free and
hurried past the cafe. “I’m not, cut it out, this is insane. I’ve said all I can—”
“You can’t just run away,” he said, grasping her arm once again. “You have
something I need, and it’ll always haunt you if you don’t give it to me—really it’s
amazing that you haven’t already, because you know you owe it to me. Did I abandon
you when you were cracking up? When you were curled up in a ball in the closet? When
your skeleton was starting to poke through your skin? When—”
“Stop! I thank you for that, I might have died, it was the right thing to do,” Rosa
said through rolling sobs. Suddenly she stopped in front of an apartment building. “I’m
staying here. Good-bye, Manuel, get some sleep,” she said and turned up the steps. But
Manuel ran up and clutched her arm, dragged her back down.
Not ever having done anything like this before, Manuel had no idea what to do or
say next. He stared curiously at his bare hand gripping Rosa’s soft coat, his spread
fingers red and bony, brittle and cracked like claws. Then all at once the words simply
came to him, rose up from some dark, untapped well within and gushed out of him in
awkward bursts. She’d better reconsider, he said sharply, she’d better tell him exactly
what happened during that time, or else . . . or else he really would put her in a book, he
really would make her into a character that was her and her alone—her whole mental
illness would be laid bare for all the world to see! And as for what caused it, he didn’t
care, he’d just make something up, that was his job, something far worse than what it
was, something embarrassing or violent, some television trash, like she was a coke fiend
or was raped twelve times by her uncle, that trusted family friend, so gentle and kind on
the surface, but seething underneath. . . .
“Oh, wouldn't that go over well in Rockford?” Manuel laughed. His voice
sounded strange, deeper than normal, shot through with gravel; but it was hollow too,
never quite filling up his words, something like an echo rumbling through a deep cave,
rolling on and on without him. “Then you'll meet an old flame—no, you’ll call him up
yourself, you could never get over him—the bleeding unstaunched! You said that! And
you’ll begin a sordid affair with him because you feel trapped in your marriage and
secretly want out, and it won’t do any good for you to deny it, because everybody believes
a book more than a person, that’s just a fact. Oh, don’t think I won’t do it, Rosa. I don’t
want to, but I will. So just tell me!” he shouted, or tried to shout; again his voice seemed
merely its own cold echo, even more deeply recessed and distant. Manuel grimaced,
clenched his teeth, which were chattering in the cold like loose rocks. He gave Rosa’s
arm one last shake, but weakly this time, numbly, like a sleepy child tugging at his
mother’s sleeve; then he added faintly, “Tell me.”
During most of his tirade Rosa had glared at Manuel in horror, too stunned even
to cry out for him to stop. But then apparently she too heard the odd dissonance in his
voice, leaking through his threats like the icy steam of his breath. She stopped crying and
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watched and listened with increasing distance and curiosity, as though from a high
balcony, so that when at last Manuel’s monologue sputtered to a close, she simply tilted
her head back in the gauzy snow and cracked open her mouth in a kind of rapture—how
simple it was after all to break free. Then she looked at him one last time and made a
rock hard fist, not to punch him as he thought at first, but in triumph, in celebration,
because in that fist was the secret, and before Manuel could pry apart those slender
fingers, before he could beg forgiveness, before he could tell her he loved her still, or
some other such nonsense, Rosa had stuffed the fist deep in her coat pocket, turned on the
icy steps, ducked under the falling curtains of snow, and vanished into the doorway.
Manuel stood at the bottom of the steps getting wrapped in layer upon layer of the
dense white fabric, his lips parted but silent, his hands extended in a futile grasp at the
frigid air spilling between his fingers. Only much later would Manuel understand that
this was his release too, the end of the long thread he’d been following for months; that
this was the story he was searching for, the story he’d first dreamed in “The Diary” but
never really lived—not one he would ever write, but one in which he himself was written.
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Tulunasia Park
From The Tulunasia Journal, Autumn:
Some time ago, I was fortunate to spot a copy of Dr. Diana Siam’s piercing study
of dreams, Concurrent Dimensions, on an obscure shelf of the Tulunasia Park library. It
lay balanced horizontally atop two slim volumes of equal height – one by a Chinese
philosopher whose name now escapes me, the other by Castore, the local botanist, on the
subject of medicinal herbs. I had only recently settled for good on this reflective coast,
and so could not help but stand grinning for a moment at this odd juxtaposition. I
wondered, as I did quite often during that first month, how I could ever have once
misunderstood this kind of disorder. It was clearly a pleasant moment, my accidental
arrival at this most unlikely bridge of books, yet before I might have heaved a bitter sigh
at this further evidence, however slight, of a malaise of indifference rapidly spreading
throughout the world—the symptoms of which I knew very well, since I had a rather
severe case myself. I would later examine this and other like signs of my remarkable
change of mind in exhaustive depth, but at the time I had not a minute’s patience with
self-reflection. All I knew for certain was that I knew very little, and that this was
undoubtedly the most lucid moment of my life. I grabbed on impulse all three books,
blew a decade or so of dust off Concurrent Dimensions, and sat down to immerse myself
in this text of which I’d lately heard such reverent praise.
I have since then read the book many times. Controversial in its time and place,
the wonder of Dr. Siam’s search, the intensity of her desire to glimpse mysteries thickly
shrouded by everydayness, now strikes a more resonant chord within us all. Perhaps
nowhere is this more evident than in her introductory chapter. There Dr. Siam, anxious to
 Perhaps “loudly ignored” would be more accurate. Because of its “unusual” scope and “unverifiable” experimental methods, many of
Dr. Siam’s former colleagues at the University of California at La Duerma had in various publications condemned Concurrent
Dimensions as “a preposterous and absurd fiction” and as “yet another personal whim masquerading as serious scholarship, based as it
is upon a total absence of fact.”
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plunge into the deep waters of her startling discovery yet filled too with humble regard for
its many nearly inexpressible ambiguities, introduces her metaphor of the “living mirror”
to suggest that each individual can through dreams awaken to a world of unlimited
possibilities:
We have all [she writes] at least once been suddenly awakened from a
dream only to try, while still semi-conscious, to fall back into that sleeping world.
Our impulse then is not merely to see, as if watching a film, how the problems set
forth in the dream will resolve themselves; we want, rather, to act in the film
ourselves, to live with our whole being every facet of the unknown experience. We
do not consider in this hazy state that the attempt is in any way odd, nor by any
means futile. We fully and easily believe in the simple reality of the vision. Even
so, we will later, when completely “awake,” claim with a distorted and at times
almost desperate arrogance that the image we so confidently sought was ‘only a
dream.’
How can I explain how misguided this waking notion is? A dream is not a
distortion, but an opportunity, a welcome chance to steal a glance into a kind of
living mirror. And I know now that if we but allow the instinct which insists upon
a return to that dreaming world the freedom it deserves; if we relinquish our rigid
belief in the supremacy of the waking self and day and night give ourselves over
to the mirror’s image, we eventually become conscious of the mind which has
always been conscious of each of us – the mind that has in fact created each of us,
and which is restored to awareness again only when the dream allows. We
discover at once a perspective we can never lose and so immerse ourselves in an
unending cycle in which all dreams turn inside out (22).
Later in the work, of course, Dr. Siam recounts the series of dreams she had which led her
to this brink of possibility, and then ends with a detailed discussion of how such selfabandonment naturally enables one to control the various settings of his or her own
dreams. I always felt it intriguing that Dr. Siam, while still an assistant professor at La
Duerma, succeeded in overcoming not only the limitations of her own mind, but those
inherent in her professional field as well. She was, I felt, as one trained in the “objective”
framework of the scientific method, working at a considerable disadvantage, so I was
certain she was an unusually sensitive and perceptive individual. Since she has recently
moved east to Tulunasia Park, I have found this true in the extreme.
Which is not to say that she feels the same way herself; on the contrary, her
humility is so genuine it’s startling—so much so that I became in a short time convinced
that this characteristic formed the very basis of her remarkable emotional and mental
powers. When I first met her, I could do little more than emit a series of breathless,
fragmented praises, comparing her in less than a minute to six or seven of the greatest
minds in history. Naturally she was rather taken aback and seemed puzzled as to how she
should respond. “I mean, in your dream it was no accident,” I ran on excitedly. “You
actually figured it out.”
Dr. Siam smiled to put me at ease, gave a light shrug. “But it was because of
weakness,” she said finally. “I only ‘figured it out,’ as you say, because of doubt, because
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I kept refusing to give myself up.” Then she shook her head, perhaps considering, as one
who has by chance escaped a violent accident does at times for the rest of his or her life,
how close she came to disaster and, most of all, how unreasonably she was spared. “Oh,
on the surface, of course I had something to prove. But often when I wrote I swore I was
cracking up, and to be honest, I believe now that’s the main reason I did write at all – I
mean, to prove my own insanity, if that makes any sense!”
I nodded in recognition, and she added with a wink: “I suppose there are those
who say I did precisely that. But the basic truth of the matter is that I was terribly alone
and frightened, just like anyone else. Just like yourself, no doubt.”
With these words Dr. Siam put to rest my excessive awe, and at once we began to
speak at great length about our respective dreams. We continue to do so now, at least
once a week, since both of us consider the subject inexhaustible. I am always delighted
by the many colorful details Dr. Siam manages to recall, not because they are so very
unusual as because they invariably bring out in her a deep fascination more common to a
child’s perception than a “scholar’s.” Like a child, she seems to notice and internalize
everything that enters her field of vision – and, I would argue, a few things that don’t.
Like a child she remains surprised at what seem the most insignificant phenomena,
reacting to each as if it were occurring for the first time, which (as I know now) it actually
is.
It is in a kind of playful celebration of this child’s sense that I describe one of my
dreams below. My analysis hardly pretends to compare itself with the daring
complexities of Concurrent Dimensions. My only hope is that I can reflect at least one of
the fresh, bright beams Dr. Siam’s work forever emits.
In simpler words, my dream is nothing new, but it is a good story nonetheless.
**
I am not quite foolish enough to attempt to square a circle, yet this is precisely my
task. The simultaneous images of this dream naturally defy my narrative corners, and I
realize already I could end wherever I begin. This dream seems to me not unlike the
highmasted ship my patient eyes just guided out to sea. Elevated on this grassy hill high
above the sun-spotted ocean, I followed the ship’s gentle, bobbing course as far as I could
until all at once it vanished into a think, vaporous line of reddish sea, sky, and sun—one
moment the spot of a real vision reflected in my eyes, the next the trace of a memory
protected deep within my present consciousness.
This dream is that pinpoint world, a nearly invisible gem of fantastic cut, since
even if we should study it every day for years we would glimpse but a tiny fraction of its
ten thousand facets. I should like you to see them all. I should tell you, for instance, that
in one part of my dream I was a child of five sitting in my grandfather’s lap, his warm
calloused hands kneading my cool feet as if they were soft lumps of clay; or that in
another, my ten-year-old self found it difficult to disguise his desire to gaze for hours at
his brother’s rose-smothered corpse. You should relive with me as well the part of my
dream in which I sat in a darkened theatre and for the first time grasped an affectionate
hand, only to stroke at once its one mutilation, a middle finger chopped short by a lawn
mower, a purple bulbous stub. Yes, I should tell you every such detail but that they
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comprise a formidable sea; I would surely thrash about and then drown in any attempt to
recall them all. I must therefore be content to limit my narrative to the single facet of the
dream which even now I can’t help but remember at least once per day, the pivotal scenes
that directly preceded my waking.
I entered this part of the dream terrifically bored at age twenty-two. A year out of
college and still unemployed, isolated from friends who had vanished happily into the
work force, I was content to wallow in my personal creed that I could do absolutely
nothing well – or rather, that I could do everything with unsurpassed mediocrity.
“Travel” was the only genuine interest I listed on my resume, though I had never once left
New England. I was in fact still living in my parents’ home in Old Mystic, Connecticut.
They were convinced I was looking for a job, and I suppose it did appear that way.
I received at least one rejection letter every day for three months, but I had known all
along that I was only remotely qualified for about five or six of the positions. I still do
not know what an Obstructive Financier is or does; all I knew then was that at least one
was needed on every continent except Antarctica, and that I was willing to learn.
Occasionally, my parents’ friends and relatives tried to place me in their various
offices, but these little experiments proved embarrassing for all concerned. My
benefactors were clearly unnerved by the detached, methodical manner in which I carried
out my assigned tasks, no doubt thinking me rather lazy, if not a little soft in the head.
“Use your common sense,” they told me time and time again when they invariably
became exasperated with my frequent questions, and for weeks thereafter I’d try fervently
to summon this benevolent god to my aid. But somehow these attempts always ended in
some great disaster or another, and the boss we rarely saw would come storming in,
shouting “Who did this?!” over and over, and of course the friend or relative who hired
me was to blame. Soon I would find myself relieved of more and more responsibilities,
until at last, ashamed and nearly brain-dead with boredom, I couldn’t help but wonder
rather bitterly if it were precisely this “common sense” that enabled its happy possessors
to spend nearly every day of their lives in such a meaningless way. Then, of course, we’d
have to contrive some circumstantial parting – they had these budget cuts, I had this new
job on the horizon – oh, it was awful! After a while, whenever my parents would have
any of these helpful people over for dinner, I would either quietly disappear, or, when
flight was impossible, like a child develop the symptoms of a mild illness – something at
which I became alarmingly adept – and beg my absence be excused.
I had in my dream one night declared myself off-limits in just this manner, when
one Harry Sneed made it his business to interrupt my solitude. I cannot say I was
surprised. Of all my parents’ acquaintances, Harry Sneed was the only one who seemed
to care that I was not present when he was. Not that he liked me; on the contrary, he
thought me an idle loafer and never missed an opportunity to try to convince my parents,
in a voice plenty loud enough for me to hear, that all I needed was “ a good, hard kick in
the pants” – a prescription for the world’s ills to which he had frequent recourse in the
editorials he wrote for a local newspaper called the Examiner-Voice.
But I think what bothered him most of all was the idea that anyone in the world
thought he could avoid Harry Sneed, much less someone right upstairs, and finally he
cracked. That night I heard him shouting my name at least six times during dinner,
actually calling up to me with cupped mouth, “He-ey, Tyrone! I’m coming to get you,
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Tyrone!” In the middle of his fourth scotch, he stormed up the stairs to my tiny cell,
which was papered, I remember, with posters of every place I’d ever hear d of except
Connecticut. Harry scowled at this montage, picked up his balding scalp, and then
pronounced my sentence with a smile that creased his face like a moist incision. My little
charade was over, he said; I was to report to the Examiner-Voice the following morning at
seven sharp.
Of course, I had no intention of working for Harry, but a nervous, self-effacing
speech from my father weakened my resolve. The half-time job seemed perfect for me,
he pointed out with wrenching timidity, a nice little boost; I would finally have the
opportunity to use my competence in writing and my degree in psychology, a degree he
knew I’d worked hard for—and an achievement he too was proud of, since he’d never
had such a chance. I did not have the courage to contend that the job—which involved
writing a dream interpretation column squeezed rather inconspicuously beneath the
horoscopes in the lower left-hand corner of the entertainment page—probably had as little
to do with psychology as my college curriculum had; nor did I have the courage to inform
him that I of all people was the one of the least qualified for the job, since I had been for
what seemed like years unable to remember a single one of my own dreams. Instead I
resigned myself to my fate with a sigh and the next day assumed the column’s traditional
nom de plume, my new identity, Dr. Johann Christian Doppel.
As with other jobs I had fallen into in the past, I had no idea how to go about
performing it correctly, if indeed that were possible. This time, however, confusion
seemed to work to my advantage; in fact, what surprised me most about this job was that
I actually enjoyed it. For instance, one young married woman wrote that one night after
she had argued with her husband, she dreamt that they were poor and living in a
totalitarian state—“behind the Iron Hand,” as she put it. They tried to escape by
swimming across a narrow river, he holding their son and she their daughter. When she
made it to freedom—which was where they had been born—some people there asked
where her husband was, at which point she turned and saw that he and her son were
drowning. She swam out to meet them and without hesitating chose to rescue her
husband. Her son disappeared under the water, and when she reached the riverbank she
discovered that her husband too was dead. As she was hitting him on the chest to revive
him, she woke up.
It was of course quite clear to Dr. Doppel, that keen observer of the human drama,
that “something was lacking” in her relationship with her husband. Living in the
dictatorship most likely meant that she felt stifled, and probably represented as well her
inner anger, which she usually kept concealed. Thus, crossing the river indicated (as I
suppose it usually did), that she had to make some sort of decision, which would
somehow help lead them back to the more equal partnership they’d started with; however,
it was clear that both she and her husband were burdened by certain immaturities,
represented in the dream by their son and daughter. Now, since she and her daughter
made it to the other side, she evidently felt that she was the stronger of the two; her
husband, after all, was drowning under the burden of the son. Choosing to save her
husband, then, instead of her son suggested that she wished he would rid himself of his
immature characteristics, but the fact that he did not survive the ordeal probably meant
that she felt he could not. Still, she also believed she must keep trying by “hitting him in
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the chest”—What else? The heart! – in an attempt to “revive” his inner sensitivity to her
needs.
Although I was always aware that what I wrote was, psychologically speaking, far
from credible, I soon grew very fond of my Dr. Doppel. There he was, the eminent
Austrian physician of mysterious origin, sitting high on his Alp at his broad, pondering
desk, breathing in the perplexing dreams of the world below, breathing out their easy
solutions. From such altitude, his long-winded nonsense seemed to make very good
sense indeed. And so it became sort of a game for me to see how much of this absurdity I
could get away with—apparently quite a lot, because to my astonishment every day a
couple of handfuls of letters addressed to Dr. Doppel were dumped into my cubicle.
Naturally, I chose to respond in print only to the most dramatic dreams, such as the one
above, though to be honest my readers’ entertainment was my least concern. All I wanted
in this part of my dream was to get through the day with a minimum of boredom, and
apparently the only way I could was to respond to these strangers’ dreams with
interpretations as light as a soft snowfall on April Fool’s.
I admit I grew in time more and more suspicious of this Dr. Doppel, but only after
what I assume was a couple of months was I forced to face the startling implications of
my careless creation. I can never possibly forget the grotesque scene I contrived in which
Bundt – the stump of a man who edited the unprestigious and often ridiculed Living
section in which Dr. Doppel’s kindly elucidations appeared – leapt on me as I entered the
newsroom one morning and kissed me like a seal. I swear the man was close to tears.
“Go check the numbers!” he said, after choking out a few unintelligible words of
gratitude, then just shook my unresponsive hand with his ink-stained flippers and scurried
away.
I stood stunned for a moment in Bundt’s wake, but a quick check of the bulletin
board explained his exuberance. The paper’s quarterly survey indicated that 88 percent
of all subscribers to the Examiner-Voice “always” or “nearly always” read Dr. Doppel
Interprets Your Dreams and that about 44 percent turned to it before reading anything
else. Apparently as a result, the lowly Living section was now the “most important,” the
“most interesting,” and the “most helpful” in the entire paper. Further, a few posted
letters heaped praise on the column, describing Dr. Doppel, much to my embarrassment,
as “wise,” “careful,” and “concerned.” One reader insisted that he trusted the good doctor
with his dreams far more than anyone else, and another even thanked the Examiner-Voice
for “bringing to this region such a sincere and sympathetic, albeit invisible, father
confessor.”
I stared at all this in vacant disbelief, but then a sudden perturbation sent me
hurrying through the newsroom’s labyrinth of partitions and desks to my cubicle. The
situation there was far worse that I had expected. My desk was smothered beneath a
mutant pile of almost two hundred envelopes!
In awe I sifted idly through the stack; a few letters tumbled like dry leaves to the
smeared yellow tiles below. I did not then understand just how easily, and how
desperately, people would reveal their most oppressive fears and desires to even the
slightest hint of a benign, responsive authority in the world, but there in front of me was
the overwhelming proof. Even then I suspected that these dreams would be far more
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disturbing than the previous ones. Selecting a letter from the pile’s summit, I trembled to
see how accurate my guess might be.
The letter was from a 44-year-old man who prefaced his dream by telling me all
about his job at a medallion factory. He wrote he was one of fourteen employees there
who sat all day long in front of a deafening monster of a machine that pressed gold,
silver, and bronze into prepared molds. For safety reasons their hands had to be bound in
leather straps that dangled on long cords from the top of each press.
He was in his nightmare pressing at superhuman speed hundreds of gold
commemoratives, which he had in fact done earlier that day while awake. In a blur he
placed the shimmering blanks into the mold, pressed the dirty black button to activate the
machine, and then removed the finished product – piles and piles of patriotic medals
celebrating New London’s submarines. He said that at first he was proud of himself, and
hopeful too that such amazing efficiency would be recognized by a quarter-an-hour raise,
but soon he began to feel unusually tired and queasy. He decided he’d take a short break
but at once realized he couldn’t stop by himself. As if detached from his body, his hands
continued to work at a furious pace. He glanced desperately to either side of him only to
see his fellow workers, their hands obediently strapped, flopping about like wooden
marionettes. He began to sob uncontrollably but could shed no tears. Frantic, he tried to
stick his head under the two-ton press as it slammed down on the blank gold before him,
but a tight leather strap appeared around his neck to prevent him. Each time he tried, the
strap yanked his head back with greater violence, until at last his neck began to bleed.
Sobbing without tears, choking without dying, he woke up.
I shook my head and sighed throughout, but oddly enough it was only after I had
finished reading the letter that I realized what should have unsettled me most of all. The
very idea should have made me recoil the moment I’d read the letters on the bulletin
board. I suppose I too had begun to consider Dr. Doppel an essence far removed, because
only at that moment did I face the awful fact that the role of New London’s wise, sincere,
sympathetic, and invisible father confessor was solely mine.
My gape slid gradually into a smirk. I emitted through my nose a few short bursts
of breath, and then at last I broke. I laughed so loud and long that even cynical old Harry
Sneed from way across the newsroom stood glaring at me, obviously impressed. How on
earth could I possibly respond to such a letter in eleven column inches below the
horoscopes and to the left of the comics? Should I tell him the truth? I wondered. Should
I tell him he should quit his job and leave this town for good before it was too late? That
was after all precisely my suggestion for the both of us. I stared into the mountain of
letters, randomly tiered on my desk like the exploded white ruins of an Aztec pyramid,
and my fit grew worse; for the life of me I just couldn’t stop laughing. “Their only hope,”
I said, gasping for air, “Their only hope would rather be in Qatar!”
This was by far my dream’s lowest moment, but as Dr. Siam points out in
Concurrent Dimensions, such times ironically bring us closer than ever to insight. My
mind had there for the first time in my dream taken one stop off its usual track, and I
assure you I felt both the exuberance and the solitude such supposed objectivity insists
upon. I did not, however, consider myself as I had before, perched above my readers on
some high plateau. On the contrary, I had now a glimpse of how little I knew, and though
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this is, as I mentioned earlier, a good definition of lucidity, I was unable at the time to
perceive it as anything but the most base ignorance.
At once my fit of laughter ceased. I felt the ensuing silence thicken inside me, and
in a moment my spirits had sunk far deeper than ever into the swampland of self-pity. I
cursed myself, my tiresome ennui, my inability to care about anything. I shuddered at just
how indifferent I’d become – smirking at the insecurities of an entire city, toying with
confidences freely given. Who was I to laugh, to manipulate? At least they had dreams, I
thought, and with a sudden motion grabbed a fistful of letters.
These dreams proved to be much like the one the medallion presser had described.
They were always violent, usually self-destructive in places, and above all seemed
obvious magnifications of the dreamers’ waking misery. I pored over each as I had never
before. At my right lay a university textbook, a study of dreams entitled A Study of
Dreams, which I had brought with me on my first day at the Examiner-Voice. I had never
once looked inside it – not even while enrolled in the course that had required its
purchase – but now I found myself scanning its pages for secret meanings as one might
the I Ching. The latter would no doubt have proven much more helpful, but since I
wanted so badly to redeem my earlier mistakes by making these interpretations as
psychologically sound as possible, I stuck with the textbook far longer than it deserved.
In any case, I remember I had responded to about eleven or so when I suddenly
reached another impasse. Each dream seemed to demand my urgent attention – how
could I dare choose but three for publication? Only my determination not to fail once
more as Dr. Doppel prevented me from scattering the letters about the newsroom on my
way out for good. I concentrated my efforts into the construction of an elaborate system
of categorization designed to determine which dreams were the most pressing. I placed
each letter into one of three stacks – the Absurd, the Grotesque, or the Hopeless – and
then divided these into three sub-categories: the Temporarily Saved, the Brink of
Disasters, and the Lost Causes. It was a ridiculous plan from the start, but in this most
obsessive moment of my dream I even began to ask myself such questions as “Should I
answer first the Hopeless Brink of Disaster or the Absurd LostCause?
Utterly exasperated after two choices, I turned angrily away from my categories,
plunged my hand into the pile of dreams remaining, and randomly plucked out the
envelope I swore would be the last one. At once I tore it open and began to read:
Dear Dr. Doppel
A while back I started with this dream. I was on this dirty beaten bus
crowded with people who had sad eyes & mean looks & long gray faces
all dressed in drab green. The bus stops in the middle of no where & I
could not stand them any more they were so quiet so I got off. I did not
know it before but it was the right place where I was going. I knew the
land & weather right away which is important to me. There was a sound
like here & ponds but lots more woods & farms. There was only a few
small cottages & some simple places where if you need something like
food or clothes or anything realy then some people there will just give you
just like that cause every body does some time. There was also no cars or
bigger citys & only one bigger building made of stone with lots of rooms
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& books there if you want to read or walk around inside. I did not feel like
a alien but I could not help but notice that the sky even in day had not one
like us but two silver white moons. I felt thats nice & kept looking up to
see when I walked. Oh yes the people were very friendly & very much
peace. Two guessed I was new & helped me find my home.
That was one day & I dreamed about this place again every night for a
while. I like it there to do all kind of things I wanted to but never had the
time or was too scarred. Some time I fish which I like to do here. Then I
learnt to play the flute like I remember how my grandfather did. They like
me there too which is good cause I do not have too many people here
except my nieces but I dont see them that much any way. I just get sorry
when I wake up & know its all a dream.
Now Im awake & this is the problem I am writting about. It seems Im at
work some times at the place where I count the pieces for the nuke subs &
its hard to stay up cause the numbers is always just like they counted them
before. I start to dream about what morning is like in the place with the
two moons where say I might take a nap & then wake up in my kitchen to
cook dinner. What is this? My nieces they say you know dreams all right
& they wanted me to tell you & ask for help. I know I stayed alone a long
time but at 55 I had practice & cant see how I need it can you?
Sincerely
Thomas Fenster
22 Long Pond Road
I had so many different reactions to various parts of this letter that I found it
difficult when I finished to consider it as a while. I was I admit disappointed at first,
because it did not sound as desperate as some of the others I had forsaken. It seemed, in
fact, all too pleasant. Not only did I find that its language calmed my rather anxious state
of mind, but I began to wish the dream were my own. I was so surprised by its ending
that I looked for more on the reverse of the page. There was nothing there, of course, but
at once it struck me that I already had enough as it was.
By the time I had absorbed myself in it again and then once more, I felt I
understood this Thomas Fenster unusually well. He was a lonely, timid man who was
able to forget the world as easily as he could forget to count its components of
destruction, who could replace our harsh complexities with a simple, benevolent world
we could never allow ourselves to imagine, much less to understand. After all, there were
in his vision two moons – a ridiculous sight, I finally decided, which only the most
fortunate of us could ever hope to see.
This was my “interpretation,” and without once referring to that graph-riddled
textbook I examined every detail in the dream accordingly. I agreed with Mr. Fenster that
he needed no help – that he was in his mind only doing what we all wished we could do –
and insisted he need only seek professional attention if for some unlikely reason he
decided he preferred one moon to two.
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Then some time passed – perhaps two months, but definitely not three. It is
impossible to say; here the narrative corners are particularly defied. But in any case, I do
know that despite the initial burst of inspiration I received from Mr. Fenster’s letter, I had
not moved far away as soon as possible, as I had sworn I would. I had in fact only moved
to a disheveled little house some five miles north and once there had rutted myself deeper
than I ever had before. I was still Dr. Doppel from seven each morning until noon,
through my percentages were dropping so fast I knew my tenure as that tired old phantom
was surely in its last hour. After work I would invariably sit in a cinema for at least two
movies, eat at any roadside diner I could find, and then read all I could about Chad, the
Khirghiz, or Cephalonia, for instance, before dropping off at two o’clock sharp into my
usual blank sleep, wrapped in the thin rough skin of a blanket my mother had
inadvertently pinched from a KLM jet.
I had given up the fight against such rage for order; I simply no longer believed I
could or should live any other way. Surely this attitude bound me all the more tightly to
my indolent routines, but on the other hand I see now how such resignation provided for
my rapid break from them. Consider the image I projected of myself in this dream as
similar to that of a self-conscious caterpillar. I resisted for what seems now an eternity
the cocoon which had begun to spin around me. I had no idea what metamorphosis
meant; I only wanted to remain the languid worm I was. Only when I gave up my
struggle against that over which I clearly had no control – only when I gave myself over
to the unknown and allowed myself to be sealed – only then could I store the energy I
would need to burst forth at the sun’s first warmth.
And so when I felt that first piercing ray – when I found in a grassy patch outside
my front door that unstamped letter from Thomas Fenster – it seemed only natural that I
change accordingly. At once I called the Examiner-Voice and told the whimpering Bundt
that Dr. Doppel had written to himself and that the response he’d received back was to get
out while it was still safe. I then prepared a substantial breakfast that took what seemed
like the entire dream to finish. The unopened letter sat patiently on my right all the while.
I had no idea what to expect this time from Mr. Fenster; I do not recall even
making a guess. As soon as my plate was clean, I calmly laid the envelope out flat before
me and with my butter knife slit its wax seal. The flap released its grip as smoothly as
fish scales do for the seasoned angler, and with the same unconscious gentleness I peeled
it open and extracted its folded square. I read it slowly, pausing a moment at the
salutation, pleased to write there not my persona’s affected name but my own:
Dear Tyrone
Thank you for the answer which was very kind. I almost took your advice
at the end about help when I got fried from my job without even knowing
till maybe the next day when I shown up for work. My nieces they want to
put me in the hospittle but I dont think it matter now any way. I dont have
to live here any more if I dont want. Thank you though
Thomas Fenster
Long Pond
I set the letter back down on the table and watched it absorb some of the ring of
coffee my cup had left. It lay there while I washed every dish and spoon I could find, and
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it lay there while I gathered up the hundreds of maps and travel brochures I had collected
and even my globe and flung them all in the trash. I assume it lay there while I walked
nearly a dozen circles around Satayuga Park, and I remember its lying there when at
seven o’clock I collapsed exhausted onto my couch.
That the letter was in my dream what Dr. Siam calls “the perfect absurdity” – the
initial element of unexplainable mystery that shatters one’s usual vision of the world and
repaints it in a strangely different hue – should be clear. I was at this point completely
unconscious of my actions; I could do only what I felt I must, and never once stopped to
consider the reasons why. Perhaps the La Duerma professors would insist that I was in
this dream a prisoner of whim and therefore in grave danger. They would in any case
undoubtedly find me, or any of us here, currently guilty of the same. All of us at one
point could not help but see our frightening limitations; all of us were forced to admit we
had absolutely no control over our lives. But if we told them that this was the very basis
of our imaginative freedom, they would pronounce us insane and have us locked up to
prove it.
They would, however, have to find us first, and this is obviously impossible. I
only mention this imagined conflict to give you a better idea of what I was struggling
with in my dream. I felt on the one hand exhilarated by my spontaneous movements, but
they were on the other quite unfamiliar. As I lay there on the couch, I considered the
possibility that I was feeling a bit too electric, that I might be in a dangerous situation
after all. My hands had begun to wrestle themselves into knots twisted so tight I had not
the energy to wrench them apart. “Let go!” I said aloud and drew back; my voice sounded
strange, as if it had become detached. I tried to calm myself with deep breaths, taking
huge bites out of the humid air, but my lungs never quite seemed to fill to their capacity, I
couldn’t even work up a satisfying yawn. Still, I was not particularly frightened.
Frustrated, yes, deeply uncertain—but mostly just uncommonly exhausted. After about
seven and a half more gasps, I curled into the shape of a conch and listened to my
(detached) voice repeat the words of Thomas Fenster’s letter, which fell hard upon me
like heavy drops of rain. A few arrhythmic beats spattered into a pattern and then out
again, pelting the roof of my mind with unconnectable dots and then dropping off to a
trickle, as if making the decision right then to drop as one gray sheet, a drenching, hissing
torrent of thoughts cascading into a dream, the first I’d had in years.
I dreamt I was Fenster’s boss in some generic little office partitioned by drab
green cardboard. Bundt and Sneed are there, and so are my parents; they are all my
employees.
It is late in the afternoon when Fenster appears. He smiles, says hello to a few
people on his way through the labyrinth, and puts his lunch in the refrigerator. I fired him
three weeks ago. A few people laugh nervously, but I’m seething. What he needs is a
good hard kick in the pants, I think to myself. He’s trying to make me look bad, make me
throw him out. But Fenster quietly sits down at his cubicle as if innocent and begins to
count envelopes.
I hover over him until he notices me. “Am I counting the wrong ones, Tyrone?”
he asks timidly. “Give it up,” I say sharply. He looks puzzled, and I get a sick feeling in
the pit of my stomach, because somehow I already know he has no idea what he’s doing.
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“You were fried three weeks ago,” I practically whisper, and he looks up at me,
obviously frightened for a moment or two, but then just nods and smiles.
I tremble what to say. I’ve never really seen a crumbled mind before, and all I can
do is suggest he seek professional attention. Again he nods and smiles, then rises slowly
from his chair. No one laughs as he leaves the office, but the moment he’s gone they all
go back to work.
I return to my office, which is a replica of my apartment, and lie down on the
couch. I remember how much I liked Fenster. I hardly knew him, but I considered him
my best friend. He called me by my name and not Dr. Doppel like everyone else. He told
me all about his dreams, even though I didn’t have any to tell him.
I look out the window and see that night has fallen. I try to picture Fenster in that
place he always talked about, that place which sounded so much like him. I can just see
him playing the flute. Me and some of the other farmers stop our work for a moment and
listen. We all look surprised, because he’s just started learning to play, but he says it’s
nothing, we should have heard his grandfather. We all nod in appreciation. I can tell they
like him here. Fenster smiles, and as if that were my cue, I leave the others and walk with
him to the pond to see what we can catch for the night.
I remember then how we used to go fishing together, and what a seasoned angler
he truly was. I start to wish he could take me to that place, because I like to travel and
read but never seem to have the time or am too scarred. I look out the window again, at
the moon this time, and blur my eyes to see what it would be like to have not one like us
but two. I begin to wonder where he is right now and then remember his nieces are
putting him away. I hate to think of him there in that hospittle, but I don’t think it matters
now anyway. I don’t have to live here any more if I don’t want. . .
My eyes had already opened by the time I awoke to the sound of my own voice
mumbling these last few lines of Fenster’s letter. All at once I felt I understood what
these startling words meant, and a piercing sense of urgency raced through my body. In
this hazy state of mind I was certain that Thomas Fenster was about to take his life, and I
felt oddly responsible. I knew I had to find him right then.
I stood up and wobbled from side to side, disoriented in the fresh darkness; what
had seemed like only five seconds must actually have been about three hours. Giving my
head a good hard shake, I stumbled over to the table to find Fenster’s letter, which I
recalled had mentioned where he lived, but it was no longer there. I fell to the floor to
look underneath, but by the time my knees had touched, the two words had already
flashed into my mind.
Long Pond lay nearby, just on the other side of a thicket of ash behind my place.
Of course, I did not then stop to consider how interesting or amusing it was that I’d
unconsciously moved so close to Mr. Fenster’s. I simply bolted out my back door and
plunged headlong into the dark woods, crackling a path through the underbrush. It was
nearly impossible to think, and at least twice I slowed, as though about to turn back.
After all, I knew the land around the pond had years before been partitioned, sold, and
developed, and it seemed incredible that I would find Thomas Fenster by going door to
door. On the other hand, I felt compelled, pushed ever forward like the tide.
I began to imagine what I would do if he were alive, but by the time I reached the
clearing and saw the first house, I could only think how much I wanted to meet him. I
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stood for a moment as still as the pond to my right and stared into its imposing blackness.
The silence was unsettling in its perfection, and so I was relieved when I heard a fish
break the water’s surface, and then another. Taking a deep breath of the damp, fertile air,
I turned toward the house.
It was but a tiny brown cabin, apparently secluded from the others at the
easternmost tip of the pond. I stepped onto its creaking porch and knocked on a crude
screen door. Muffled metallic waves of sound echoed into the darkness all around me.
Again, I knocked, this time on the splintering wood of the house, but still I received no
answer. I was about to continue my search elsewhere and had even taken two steps back,
when my eyes fell upon the name Fenster carved on the floor of the porch. The next thing
I knew I was on the other side of the door.
I could see nothing in front of me for what seemed like an eternity. I was
impatient with my eyes, but at last they adjusted to what little light there was and
discerned a long, dark figure laid out on the floor. With each moment another of his
features emerged from the opaque. He was wearing a navy blue shirt and black trousers,
both flecked with dirt. His gray hair flowed wildly down to his shoulders, and his round,
leathery face was dotted with sharp white stubble. His wooden flute dangled from his
gnarled fingers like a tree branch.
He looked precisely as I had pictured him in my dream, or at least so I thought
then. I stared in silence at his fully materialized shape – a sculpture, it seemed, suspended
ambiguously between life and stone – and at once I felt sick, expecting the worst. My
hands began to wrestle. “Let go!” I nearly shouted, then shivered in recognition.
Thomas Fenster immediately woke and looked up and around, out the window,
and then at me. His watery gray eyes appeared at once both bleary and quizzical.
“Tyrone?” he guessed, and after I nodded, stretched like a cat into the gentle evening.
“How in the world did you manage to find me?” he yawned.
I suppose I could have asked him what in the world he meant by that, or explained
that it was actually quite simple since he’d written the location at the bottom of his letter,
or else answered him with the ten thousand questions I myself had. But all that really
wasn’t necessary, because by the time all those complicated possible responses finally
registered in my mind, I had already followed his gaze out the window and awakened to
see the twin, silvery white moons encircling Tulunasia Park, with quiet beauty and
dignity, as I knew they always did.
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A Vectorial History of Leroy Pippin
How did I get here? You mean here? Well, I was drafted. When the word came,
I was out in the fields with the other boys, in Nebraska, shocking wheat like we used to,
not even thinking. Then all of a sudden I felt my name rising and falling through the air
in a soft moan, or maybe like in a song, something like the wind does. I ignored it at first;
I mean I thought it was the wind or maybe locusts, but then I heard it again and again, so
finally I ran up to the house where everyone was planted real quiet in their chairs, like at a
wake. I knew the letter had to be something important, cause I’d never once got any mail
to speak of, much less something like this, with my name not just written but printed,
engraved on the paper, like for all time. I rubbed my thumb across the letters, left to
right, right to left; it was just so hard to believe that all together they meant me. I ran my
eyes down the page inside, not so much reading it but staring right through it to the other
side. Then I took it to my father and asked him if it meant what it said, that I had to
report to such and such place by such and such time. I guess I knew the answer already,
but the letter said something about being selected or about what an honor it was, and so
sort of made it seem like I had a choice. Of course, if I’d had a choice, I’d have stayed
right where I was, but my father took a long look at it and shook his head, said we’d
better go tell my mother.
To tell the truth, I didn’t know why she was so upset until a couple of days later
when I got to Ft. Leavenworth where I was inducted. I thought to myself, “If I go in that
tent right there, I might never come back out!” But I knew I had to go in. Like everyone
else, I went from table to table, but my glasses kept fogging up, and the men behind the
desks all looked so much the same that I found I was getting in lines two or three times
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for the same thing. And as far as what was happening, where you were going or when—
oh, they were real tight-lipped about that. It was like a big secret; if you asked, they just
pretended they hadn’t heard. They wouldn’t even look at you, just kept writing or
stamping or measuring you all around.
Then about a week later, all of a sudden they said, “Let’s go!” and packed us on a
train which just kept going and going, all night and all the next day too, until we finally
got to Virginia I think it was. They put us all in a big barn at dawn and said look to the
left and then to the right, cause one of you wasn’t going to come back unless the other
two were ready to follow orders when their time came, and just think how you’d feel if
you were the one who wasn’t ready; you’d be responsible for whatever happened, no one
else, and could you live with that? Then they marched us out of the barn and up and
down some hills, up and down until we dropped dead away almost. Any time day or
night they’d charge into our barracks and start screaming we were under attack, and we’d
have to run outside to those big guns they had, firing them at these little shacks they’d set
up in hayfields that reminded me of home.
After a couple of months, just when we were getting used to things, they said,
“Let’s go!” and half of us got on another train, this one headed northeast. We passed
through New York—I remember seeing it out the window, all the lights spinning around
like stars, and I said, “Oh boy, I’ve never seen that before.” But the train kept going, and
after a while I fell asleep. Then all of a sudden I hit my head on the seat in front of me.
Soon everybody was mumbling, and I remember how it seemed to come rolling like a
wave from the front of the car to the back where we were that this was Boston. I asked
the guy next to me if this was the end of the line, and he said it had to be. As far as he
knew, you just couldn’t go any further—we’d run out of room!
So then they marched us to South Boston, and we got on a boat to one of those
islands out there, which had more of those big guns, and underneath it all a dark, dirty
web of dungeons where they used to keep the slaves. One time they told me to unscrew
all the light globes in the barracks and put them in these huge tubs filled with water. I
said Why? but they said “Never mind.” Then they fired those guns. The first round
popped all the plugs out of the tubs, and all the water drained out. On the second round,
every single one of those globes shattered—one after the other, right on down the line,
like when a drummer hits those cymbals. I had to laugh at that—I guess I thought that
was what was supposed to happen; it all looked and sounded so perfect, like a magic
trick—but they said it wasn’t funny. I spent the rest of that day and night gluing the
globes back together and made just about all of them whole again, but before I could put
them back on the light bulbs somebody got the bright idea of putting them on the heads of
the firing range dummies so as to make them more realistic. So after all that, there they
went—pish, pesh, pash—just like before!
All the work was sort of like that—just go ahead and do it. They had everything
planned out somewhere, every minute of every day. Sunday nights a boatload of those
USO girls would come in, and they had these dances. That was something—every Sunday
night, like they were for us. Oh, but you better not touch them! Sometimes we got threeday passes and went up to Boston. One time I went into this bar downtown called The
Broken Arrow. It was a tough bar, I don’t think it’s there any more; I guess they built that
City Hall on top of all that. Well, I had a couple of drinks, until, you know, I started to
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feel it, and then these two girls sat down in the booth right across from me. They said it
was their first time there, and I said, “Oh, sure!” Of course, after a while I sat down with
the best one, this quiet, pretty Indian girl who told me not to worry, I wouldn’t get killed.
And that was my wife! I married her before we shipped out. But first they took half of us
to this other island where they asked me if I thought I could be a clerk, since I was so
skinny and had a shadow like a flagpole. One guy said I looked like “a scarecrow in the
wind,” so that’s what they called me, Scarecrow. I said I didn’t think I could be a clerk,
since I’d only had two years of school; we lived on a farm, and there was no way to get
out. But I was skinny, so I started to be a clerk for a while, until finally I’d made so many
mistakes they got mad and sent me down to the dungeons, where all I had to do was keep
the coals going twenty-four hours a day.
That went on for a couple of years; I think they just forgot about us out there.
Then all of a sudden they said, “You’re shipping out,” and we got on a boat to England,
where we spent about three months sitting real quiet in the fog. Then we went to France.
I was driving a supply truck and got stuck in the sand once, but they had these bulldozers
roaming around, and if they saw someone stuck they’d just give him a push. Finally, we
caught up to the back of where the fighting was. Oh, that was terrible; hundreds of
people were dropping on all sides. I think it could have been done different, I don’t
know. Right near me, the cook’s truck got hit by a shell and was blown to bits, nothing
left but the chassis upside down and smoking like a gridiron, and the wheels spinning in
all different directions. So later they said, “Can you cook?” and I said, Well, they had me
do it for a week in England when the other Roy was sick, but I didn’t really know how.
That was enough though, and I became a cook along with this other guy, Koch. We
didn’t need to flip the bacon! We used to laugh about that. You’d be frying them up, and
then a shell would hit somewhere nearby, and they’d just flip by themselves. Oh, that guy
Koch was really something. He was a big burly guy with big hands and fingers that were
rough and gnarled like ginger root—the complete opposite of me—so we started this
thing up where I was his shadow. One time we pulled the truck up next to this house, and
a woman in the window called down to us something that sounded to me like “What do
you feel?” or “Come up for some veal,” or “Jump into the wheel.” I didn’t know what all
she was saying; it was something just to see her lips moving like that, from side to side
and up and around at different angles, and all the while that little black circle at the center
where all the sounds were. But Koch understood a little German, or enough anyway.
“Take the wheel, Shadow,” he said and climbed right on top of the truck and into her
window. It happened like that in almost every town: “You’re in charge, Shadow.” I
used to laugh at that. “Ok, let’s go home!” I’d say, because that was something all of us
always joked or complained about; you never saw who was in charge, not really, no one
did. Koch used to say that the only proof we had that somewhere someone was in charge
was that we just kept going on and on as though there was, and what would happen if all
of a sudden we just stopped?
But of course we didn’t stop, we zigzagged all across Germany. Sometimes we
had to drive on these pontoon bridges—oh, that was scary with all those big guns, I
thought they would sink! You could see everybody slowly making their way across, the
bridge going up and down in waves. Funny thing, we’d blow up some of these bridges
and then rebuild them later. Why blow them up to begin with? Oh, you never knew
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exactly what you were doing, or what you were hitting with a shell, or what you’d come
upon after. I went to take a leak once over behind a bush, and there was this face of a
German soldier staring up at me from between the branches. Just the face. I said, “Well,
hello there.” It was always like that; it was hard to look at things, especially the children.
I never had to kill anybody up close, thank goodness. I don’t think I could’ve done it.
Anyway, when we got to the Elbe, we met the Russians coming from the other
direction, and all of a sudden we just stopped in our tracks and so did they. Then after a
long pause, half of us went up to the Baltic to help the British for a couple of weeks, and
sure enough, we met the Russians again! We didn’t say anything to them, we just
stopped and turned around. I still don’t know what that was all about. After that, we
passed through Nuremberg, which you might remember from your history. They still had
the flags up before people tore them down. Then we went down to Hitler’s headquarters.
Inside there was this big round table where I guess he had his meetings with his generals.
I said, “Get the cards!” That was something we said whenever we saw a table—“Get the
cards!” Everyone laughed, even the Sergeant. But I don’t think you could have dealt a
card across that table, it was so big. And the kitchen—me and Koch thought we’d died
and gone to heaven! Every bit of it from top to bottom was made of the shiniest stainless
steel; when you stood right in the center you could see cloudy little reflections of you
hovering all around, like in a funhouse. One time I sat down in a chair there and fell right
asleep—just like that, one blink and . . . gone! Oh, that was a beautiful place, high up in
those mountains—what are they, the Alps? It was July, but there was snow all around, so
we went outside and had a snowball fight in July! Then another time we looked down
and saw all these dark clouds and lightning and rain in the valley, but up there we were as
dry as could be. I never dreamed of such a thing. The thunderstorm was going on below
us!
I think I could have stayed up there forever, or at least another few weeks. I think
Koch did stay there, or somewhere; one day he just disappeared, and I don’t think he was
shot. The rest of us were sent back to Paris where we took over the barracks the Germans
had lived in during the occupation. They have the best subway in the world in Paris. You
can get on at one station and ride all the way around the city and come right back to
where you started, then get out and take another one across, and then up and down, like a
pinball. Sometimes I’d end up in Pig Alley—what a wild place that was. I don’t know
why they called it Pig Alley. Girls would come down from the farms, you know, for extra
money. Sometimes they’d just talk to you in French and try to pull you upstairs. Of
course, you had to pay for the motel room, and whatever else they wanted. I didn’t fool
around—well, I did a little, I guess. One time I was just sitting at a bar there, and these
two skinny little girls maybe thirteen or so sat down right in front of me. The one who
spoke English put her hand on my knee and said, “So, you made it home, good!” I kind
of smiled and looked away. We were always careful about jinxing things like that; we’d
seen too many people run right into a stray bullet just a day or two before they were
supposed to leave. “Well, almost,” I said, and they both just laughed. Then I had a funny
feeling, so I got right up and made a beeline back to the barracks. I stayed there for the
next two weeks, shining my shoes. I guess I’d had enough adventure.
I couldn’t believe it when we were finally on the boat coming back home. I
remember thinking, “What next?” My wife met me at the harbor, and we put down roots
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here in Boston—started having children, one right after another. There were four in all;
they’re all married now and live all over the place. My wife’s brother set me up with a
job at Sweetheart Plastics, where I worked making those straws with the bend in them
until fifteen years ago when I turned sixty-five. My wife and I had all kinds of plans to
travel after I retired, maybe get a camper and circle the country, but all of a sudden she
got cancer, and that was the end of that. She died right here in the house where she was
born, right in the same bed. That doesn’t happen too much any more.
I thought I’d never get over that, but I barely even think about her any more, not
even if I try to, and even then it’s like looking through a fog, you see just the outline.
Every once in a while something happens, like this bowling jacket—see how they spelled
my name on the shoulder? They made it Ray, not Roy—and while I was taking forever to
mark out the one line there and put a couple of stitches in on top to make an O, I thought
something like “Rose and her patterns,” because Rose was good at sewing things; there
was always torn tissue papers and pins and pieces of fabric scattered everywhere on the
floor, you know, Step A, Step B—oh, but you better not touch them! I still haven’t had to
buy any new clothes. This belt buckle with the striped bass on it my sister-in-law gave
me because I like to fish, and this cap with the rainbow trout and the lure is from my son.
Once a summer I take the ferry up to New Brunswick to camp and fish, up near Magnetic
Hill. That’s the only traveling I do any more, except that every once in a long while I feel
a strange pull inside and head back to Nebraska for a visit. I still have three brothers
there, right where I left them. Well, the old house has fallen in; a pair of elms are
growing right through the walls. In the basement my brothers keep mounds and mounds
of potatoes, I’m not sure why; I always worry I’m going to see someone’s head in there!
It’s real quiet at my brothers’; the TV is on a lot. I guess there isn’t much to say
any more; a lot of it is just, who’s dead now?—every week it’s someone new. They tease
me about living so far away—like it was my fault! Well, I guess it is in a way.
Sometimes we get going pretty good though, and we sit around and remember things
again, things we didn’t realize at the time. Like that night we were out shocking wheat
because it was too hot during the day, and all of a sudden I looked up and said, “Hey, the
moon is disappearing!” Pretty soon it was so dark we had to quit for the night. We were
afraid to tell anyone! Well, we didn’t know about eclipses and such, they didn’t
announce them back then. It’s funny what you remember, piecing things together in a
way they probably didn’t happen the first time, because everybody remembers them
different and sometimes not at all. And then when you’ve got the whole story
remembered and framed like a picture, it’s almost like it’s not you you’re seeing but
somebody else disguised as you.
Yeah, first you fly into Omaha and then take the highway for about eighty miles or
so until you get to the Six Corner Road. Take a right there and then go about six miles,
and just as you get to the top of the hill, stop right there!—that’s Humboldt. Oh, I can’t
tell you what it means to me to see it all spread out below in a big circle, like a spinning
wheel. I feel all light-headed, almost empty. Humboldt—that’s my hometown!
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