Kitabı oku: «Mr. X»
PETER STRAUB
Mr X
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are
the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is
entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollinsPublishers 2000
First published in the USA by
Random House, Inc. 1999
Copyright © Peter Straub 1999
The Author asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780002261425
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2002 ISBN: 9780007387977
Version: 2016-08-10
Dedication
For my brothers, John and Gordon Straub
Epigraph
I could not weigh myself – Myself –
My size felt small – to me – I read your Chapter in the Atlantic – and experienced honor for you – I was sure you would not reject a confiding question –
Is this – Sir – what you asked me to tell you?
E—Dickinson
Emily Dickinson,
letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
April 25, 1862
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
1 How I Came Home, and Why
1
2 Mr X
3
4
5
6
7
8 Mr X
9
10
11
12
13 Mr X
14 Mr X
15 Mr X
2 How I Learned About River-Bottom
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26 Mr X
27
28
29
3 How I Nearly Was Killed
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39 Mr X
40 Mr X
4 How I Found My Shadow at Last and What it Did
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54 Mr X
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
5 How I Learned to Eat Time
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81 Mr X
82 Mr X
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
6 How I Spent My Birthday
110
111
112
113
114
115 Mr X
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
Keep Reading
Author’s Note
About the Author
Praise
Also by the Author
About the Publisher
1 How I Came Home, and Why
1
Stupid me – I fell right into the old pattern and spent a week pretending I was a moving target. All along, a part of me knew that I was hitching toward southern Illinois because my mother was passing. When your mother’s checking out, you get yourself back home.
She had been living in East Cicero with two elderly brothers above their club, the Panorama. On weekends she sang two nightly sets with the house trio. She was doing what she had always done, living without worrying about consequences, which tends to make the consequences come harder and faster than they do for other people. When she could no longer ignore her sense of fatality, my mother kissed the old brothers goodbye and went back to the only place I’d be able to find her.
Star had been eighteen when I was born, a generous, large-souled girl with no more notion of a settled life than a one-eyed cat, and after I turned four I bounced back and forth between Edgerton and a parade of foster homes. My mother was one of those people who are artists without a specific art. She apprenticed herself sequentially and many times over to painting, writing, pottery, and other crafts as well as to the men she thought embodied these skills. She cared least about the one thing she was best at, so when she stood up and sang she communicated a laid-back, good-humored ease her audiences found charming. Until the last few years of her life she had a soft, melting prettiness that was girlish and knowing, feline and earthy, all at once.
I lived with six different couples in four different towns, but it wasn’t as bad as it sounds. The best of my six couples, Phil and Laura Grant, the Ozzie and Harriet of Naperville, Illinois, were almost saintly in their straightforward goodness. One other couple would have given them a run for their money if they hadn’t taken in so many kids they wore themselves out, and two others were nice enough, in a this-is-our-house-and-these-are-the-rules way.
Before I went to Naperville, now and then I did go back to Cherry Street, where the Dunstans lived in their various old houses. Aunt Nettie and Uncle Clark took me in as though I were an extra piece of luggage Star had brought along. For a month, maybe six weeks, I shared a room with my mother, holding my breath and waiting for the next earthquake. After I moved in with the Grants, this pattern changed, and Star visited me in Naperville. She and I had come to an agreement: one of those deep agreements people don’t need words to strike.
The core of our agreement, around which everything else wrapped itself, was that my mother loved me and I loved her. But no matter how much she loved me, Star didn’t have it in her to stay in one place longer than a year or two. She was my mother, but she couldn’t be a mother. Which meant that she couldn’t help me deal with the besetting problem that frightened, distressed, or angered the foster parents I had before the Grants. The Grants accompanied me on a procession through doctors’ offices, radiology departments, blood tests, urine tests, brain tests, I can’t even remember them all.
Boiled down to essentials, it comes out this way: even though Star loved me, she could not care for me as well as the Grants could. On those days when Star came to Naperville, we put our arms around each other and we cried, but we both knew the deal. She usually showed up just after Christmas and almost always right at the start of summer, after I got out of school. But she never came on my birthdays, and she never sent me anything more than a card. Birthdays were when my problem came down on me, and my problem made her feel so rotten she didn’t want to think about it.
I think I always understood this, but it didn’t make conscious sense, a sense I could use, until two days after my fifteenth birthday. I came home from school to find waiting on the hall table an envelope addressed in my mother’s back-slanted handwriting. It had been mailed from Peoria on my birthday, June 25. I took the envelope into my room, dropped it on my desk, put Gene Ammons’s Groove Blues on the turntable, and, once the music began flowing into the air, opened the envelope and looked at the card my mother had sent me.
Balloons, streamers, and lighted candles floated above an idealized suburban house. Inside, beneath the printed Happy Birthday!, she had written the only message she ever put on one of her cards:
My beautiful boy –
I hope …
I hope …
Lots o love,
Star
I knew that her wishes weren’t for a happy birthday but an untroubled one, which would have been happiness enough. A half second after this insight opened the door, the first adult recognition of my life slammed into me, and I saw that my mother slighted my birthdays because she blamed herself for what befell me then. She thought I got it from her; she could not bear to think about my birthdays because they made her feel guilty, and guilt was the emotion free spirits like Star could least handle.
The sound of Gene Ammons playing ‘It Might as Well Be Spring’ soared out of the speakers and passed straight into the center of my body.
In khaki shorts and polo shirts, the Grants were monitoring the progress of herbs and vegetables in their garden. In the moment before they noticed me, I experienced the first in about a month of those What’s wrong with this picture? moments, an animal awareness of my incongruity in this sweet suburban landscape. Danger; shame; isolation: exposure. Me and my shadow, there we were. Laura turned her head, and the bad feeling vanished even before her face warmed and somehow deepened, as if she knew everything going on inside me.
‘Action Jackson,’ Phil said.
Laura glanced at the card, then back into my eyes. ‘Star could never forget your birthday. Can I see it?’
Both Grants liked my mother, though they liked her in different ways. When Star came to Naperville, Phil turned on an old-fashioned courtliness he thought was suave but Laura and I found hilarious, and Laura made room to talk by going out with her for an hour’s shopping. I think she usually slipped her fifty or sixty bucks, too.
Laura smiled at the elegant white house and birthday-party froufrou on the front of the card and looked up at me. The second grown-up recognition of my life flew between us like a spark. Star had chosen this card for a reason. Laura did not evade the issue. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we had dormer windows and a wraparound porch? If I lived in a place like that, I’d impress myself.’
Phil moved closer, and she opened the card. Her eyebrows contracted as she read the message. ‘“I hope …”’
‘I hope for that, too,’ I said.
‘Of course you do,’ she said, getting it.
Phil squeezed my shoulder, getting into executive mode. He was a products manager at 3M. ‘I don’t care what these clowns say, it’s a physical problem. Once we find the right doctor, we’re going to lick that thing.’
‘These clowns’ were my pediatrician, the Grants’ GP, and the half dozen specialists who had failed to diagnose my condition. The specialists had concluded that my problem was ‘not of organic origin,’ another way of saying that it was all in my head.
‘Do you think I got it from her?’ I asked Laura.
‘I don’t think you got it from anybody,’ Laura said. ‘But if you’re asking me does she feel terrible about it, sure she does.’
‘Star?’ Phil said. ‘Star would have to be nuts to blame herself.’
Laura was watching to see how much I understood. ‘Mothers want to take on anything that could hurt their kids, even the things they can’t do anything about. What happens to you makes me feel terrible, and I can’t even imagine what it does to Star. At least I get to see you every day. If I were your real mother, and my only chance to end world hunger for the next thousand years meant I had to go out of town on your birthday, I’d still feel awful about letting you down. I’d feel awful anyway, real mother or not.’
‘Like you weren’t doing the right thing,’ I said.
‘Your mother loves you so much that sometimes she can’t stand not being Betty Crocker.’
The idea of Star Dunstan being anything like Betty Crocker made me laugh out loud.
Laura said, ‘Doing the right thing doesn’t always make you feel good, no matter what anybody says. Doing the right thing can hurt like the dickens! If you want my opinion, you have a great mom.’
I would have laughed again, this time at her Girl Scout’s notion of cursing, but my eyes stung and a thick obstruction filled my throat. A little while ago, I said that two days after my fifteenth birthday I came to understand my mother’s feelings in a way I could use, and this is what I meant. I learned to ask questions about the things that scare you; that doing right could make you hurt too bad to think straight; that once you are you that’s who you are, and you have to pay the price.
2 Mr X
O Great Old Ones, read these words inscribed within this stout Journal by the hand of Your Devoted Servant and rejoice!
I always liked walking late at night. In a comfortable city like Edgerton, the enormous blanket of darkness cushions even the sound of your footsteps on the pavement. I walk down the avenues, past the empty department stores and movie theaters. I drift down Hatchtown’s narrow lanes and look up at shuttered windows I could pass through in a second, but do not: part of my happiness is in the weighing and measuring of the lives about me. And like anyone else, I enjoy getting out of the house, escaping the captivity of that sty to which I am self-condemned. During my rambles I avoid street lamps, though regardless of the season I am dressed in a black coat and hat – a moving shadow, invisible in the darkness.
Or: nearly invisible. Invisible to all but a deeply unfortunate few, many of whom I admit to killing less from the need to protect myself than out of … pique, maybe, or whimsy. There was one exception.
I subtracted from the world the gangly hooker in stacked, high-heel sandals and a skirt the size of a washcloth who launched herself toward me from a Chester Street doorway, so high on whatever girls were doing for fun that year that she grabbed my elbow to keep from swaying. I looked at the pinpoint dots of her pupils and let her pull me toward the doorway, opened her up like a can of sardines, and broke her neck before she remembered to scream.
I gave more or less the same treatment to the kid wearing a black sweatshirt and fatigue pants who saw me because he thought he was looking for someone like me, surprise, surprise, and the young woman with a black eye and swollen lips who wavered out of a parked car at the sound of my footsteps and tried to get back into the car once she saw me, but it was too late, poor baby. And let us not forget the actual baby I found abandoned atop a Dumpster and assisted in its departure from an inhospitable world by detaching its darling little hands and excising its little outraged eyes.
The baby had not seen me, true. I believe that requires an especially heightened degree of sorrow or misery, loss so irreparable as to make the rest of life an eternal wound, and the baby was merely cold and hungry. But long ago, an untimely arrest and imprisonment kept me from doing the same to another newborn, and anger got the better of me. I never claimed to be perfect.
The noisome, Night Train-reeking dwarf I killed to protect myself had pulled himself upright between the garbage cans in the alley alongside Merchants Hotel and gaped at my approach. All but a few of his ilk fail to see me even when they are looking directly at me, and those few have the sense to back away. This fellow was still too foggy for sense. A ragged shaft of star-shine caught his eye. ‘Root-toot-toot, fuckin’ Dracula,’ he said. He giggled and leaned shakily over the garbage cans to inspect the grubby cement. ‘Hey, where’d Piney go to? You seen Piney, Drac?’ He referred to a more functional version of himself, a shabby outcast of whose existence I had long been vaguely aware.
‘Rooty-tooty,’ said the wretch, who would have gone on destroying himself without my assistance had he not followed his mantra by suddenly peering at me with a hideous mixture of delight and confusion and saying, ‘Hey, man, talk about long time no see. I thought I heard … I thought you was … aah …’
He was one Erwin ‘Pipey’ Leake, some thirty years previous a hard-drinking young English instructor at Albertus University and a hanger-on of my bohemian period.
‘Is Star … Star Dunstan, isn’t she …’
I gripped his throat and slammed his head against the bricks. He tugged at my wrist, and I clamped my free hand over his face and twice more drove his head against the wall. The eyes of the former acolyte floated upward, and a stench of dead fish came from his mouth. When I let go, he crumpled between the garbage cans. I smashed my boot onto his head, heard his skull crack, and kept stamping until the side of his head turned soft.
These idiots should know enough to keep their mouths shut.
Great Beings, You who in aeons to come shall linger over these words penned by Your Devoted Servant, You alone comprehend my certainty that a great change is in the air. The culmination of that Sacred Mission entrusted to me and so teasingly adumbrated by the Providence Master has begun to declare its appearance upon the earthly stage. As I walk unseen through the city, the flow of information sharpens and intensifies, bringing with it the promise of that destiny for which I have waited since I was a boy taking lessons from the foxes and owls in Johnson’s Woods.
Here, in a room stacked with microwave ovens and laptop computers, a professional thief and occasional arsonist named Anton ‘Frenchy’ La Chapelle lies unconscious in sleeping embrace with one Cassandra ‘Cassie’ Little, a hard-bitten little scrubber. Hello, Frenchy, you delightfully nasty piece of work! You don’t know it, but I imagine that your pointless life is going to serve some purpose after all.
Here, on the second floor of a rooming house, Otto Bremen, a grade-school crossing guard, slumbers before his television screen with a not quite empty bottle of bourbon nestled in his crotch. The last half inch of a cigarette burns inexorably toward the first two fingers of his right hand. The conjunction of the cigarette and Frenchy’s secondary occupation suggests a possibility, but many things are possible, Otto, and whether or not you are to die in a fire – as I rather think you are – I wish, with the puppet-master’s fondness for his insensate and pliable creatures, that you might know a minute portion of the triumph rushing toward me.
For in my city’s secret corners I already see runners of the blue fire. It hovers over Frenchy and his partner, it travels down the crossing guard’s arm, and it gathers itself for an electrifying moment along the rain gutters on Cherry Street, where the surviving Dunstans eke out their blasted lives. Enormous forces have begun to come into play. Around our tiny illuminated platform suspended in the cosmic darkness, the ancient Gods, my true ancestors, congregate with rustlings of leathery wings and rattlings of filthy claws to witness what their great-grandson shall accomplish.
A most marvelous event has taken place. Star Dunstan has come home to die.
Can you hear me, slug-spittle?
Listen to me, you exhausted bag of skin –
My dearest hope is that your flesh should blister, that you should have to labor for the smallest gulps of air and feel individual organs explode within you, so on and so forth, your eyes to burst, that kind of thing, but though I shall not be able to manage these matters on your behalf, my old sweetheart, I shall do my best to arrange them for our son.
3
Right from the beginning, I had the sense that something crucially significant, something without which I could never be whole, was missing. When I was seven, my mother told me that as soon as I’d learned to sit up by myself, I used to do this funny thing where I turned around and tried to look behind me. Boom, down I’d go, but the second I hit the ground I’d turn my head to check that same spot. According to Star, Aunt Nettie said, ‘That boy must think the doctor cut off his tail when he was born.’ Uncle Clark chimed in with, ‘He appears to think someone’s sneakin’ up on him.’
‘They meant you had something wrong with you,’ Star told me, ‘which was to be expected, me being your mother. I said, “My boy Neddie’s smart as a whip, and he’s seeing if his shadow followed him inside the house.” They shut up, because that was exactly how you looked – like you were trying to find your shadow.’
I can scarcely describe the combination of relief and uncertainty this caused in me. Star had given me proof that my sense of loss was real, for it had been a part of me long before I could have made it up. Even before I could walk, back when my thoughts could have been little more than the recognition of states like hunger, fear, comfort, warmth, I had been aware that it had been missing, whatever it was, and when I tried to look behind me, I was trying to find it. And if at the age of six months I was looking for the absent thing, didn’t that mean that at one time it had not been absent?
A few days later, I resolved to ask her about the difference between me and other children. A couple of things made me hesitate, as I had before. Did everyone else’s claim to a father mean that I had to have one? Or could someone like Uncle Clark or Uncle James have stepped in to sign the papers, or whatever men did to make them fathers? Uncle Clark and Uncle James displayed so little paternal feeling that they had to make an effort merely to tolerate my existence. From the start, I felt welcome in their houses only by virtue of my best behavior. A child knows these things. You know when you have to earn acceptance. On top of that, I already had the caretaker child’s sense of emotional obligation, and my mother was as unpredictable as the weather.
In the summer of my seventh year, Star was comfortable and relaxed with her family. She moved at about half her normal speed. For the first time in my life, I heard stories about her childhood and what I had been like as a baby. She helped Aunt Nettie in the kitchen and let Uncle Clark expound without telling him he was a bigoted ignoramus. Being Star Dunstan, she had signed up for a poetry workshop and a night class in watercolor painting at Albertus, which Uncle Clark called ‘Albino U.’
Three days a week, she clerked at the pawnshop owned by her stepfather, Toby Kraft, who in spite of universal Dunstan disapproval years before had married Star’s mother. Toby Kraft had reinforced the family’s distrust by moving his bride into the apartment above his shop instead of submitting to Cherry Street. Despite their general dislike, he had participated in family gatherings for the rest of Queenie’s life and continued to do so after her death, the occasion for Star’s most recent return to Edgerton and my release from the latest set of foster parents. It did not occur to me until much later that the death of her mother was behind Star’s new ease. She must have experienced an elemental relief at the lifting of Queenie’s everlasting scorn. Her second job involved what she described as ‘modeling’ a couple of nights each week at Albertus. I did not grasp at the time that this meant posing nude for students in a life-drawing class.
Our orderly existence permitted me to ask my question. I waited until we were alone in Aunt Nettie’s kitchen, me drying the dishes she washed while Nettie gabbed on the porch rocker with Aunt May, and Uncle Clark and Uncle James watched a cop show on television. Star handed me a dish, and I rubbed the cloth over its glistening surface while she described a jazz concert she had seen in the Albertus auditorium a month after my conception.
‘At first, I wasn’t even sure I liked that group. It was a quartet from the West Coast, and I was never all that crazy about West Coast jazz. Then this alto player who looked like a stork pushed himself off the curve of the piano and stuck his horn in his mouth and started playing “These Foolish Things.”’ The memory still had the power to make her gasp. ‘And, oh, Neddie, it was like going to some new place you’d never heard about, but where you felt at home right away. He just touched that melody for a second before he lifted off and began climbing and climbing, and everything he played linked up, one step after another, like a story. Neddie! It was like hearing the whole world open up in front of me. It was like going to heaven. If I could sing the way that man played alto, Neddie, I’d stop time forever and just keep on singing.’
She was trying to communicate the importance of music in her life, but at the time I had no idea of the impact these words would have on me. It would certainly never have occurred to me that one day I would find it possible to witness the rapture she was describing. All of that was far ahead of me, and I thought she was trying to keep me from asking my question.
When she stopped talking, I said, ‘I really want to know something.’
She turned her head to smile at me, warmed by the memory of the music and expecting a question about it. Then the smile clicked off, and her hands stopped moving in the water. She already knew that my question had nothing to do with an alto saxophone solo on ‘These Foolish Things.’
‘Ask away.’ She plucked a dish out of the foam with self-conscious gravity.
I knew that whatever she was going to tell me would be a lie, and that I would believe it for as long as I could. ‘Who’s my dad? He isn’t Uncle Clark, is he?’
She glanced over her shoulder, shook her head, and smiled down at me. ‘No, honey, he sure isn’t. If Uncle Clark was your daddy, Aunt Nettie would be your mommy, and wouldn’t you be in a pickle?’
‘But who is he? What happened to him?’
She seemed to concentrate on scrubbing the plate in her hands. I know now that she sat next to my father during the concert she had been talking about. ‘Your father went into the army after we got married. Because he was so smart and so strong, it wasn’t long before they made him an officer.’
‘He was an army man?’
‘One of the best army men ever,’ she said, locking into place both my disbelief and the need to deny it. ‘They sent him places ordinary soldiers couldn’t go. He wasn’t allowed to tell me about them. When you’re on a Top Secret mission, you can’t talk about it.’ She passed the plate beneath a stream of water and handed it to me. ‘That’s what your father was doing when he died. He was out on a secret mission. All they could tell me was that he died like a hero. And he’s buried in a special hero’s grave, way up on a mountainside on the other side of the world, overlooking the sea.’
I could see an American flag on a mountainous promontory far above silvery water and endless waves, marking the grave of that without which I would forever be incomplete.
‘I wasn’t supposed to tell you, but now you’re old enough to keep it to yourself. Nobody else knows what I just told you, except his superior officers.’
We washed and dried the remaining dishes in a charged but companionable silence. I knew that she was in a rush to change clothes and drive to her modeling job, but she stopped and turned around on her way to the kitchen door. ‘I want you to know something else, too, Neddie. Your father isn’t the only thing you have to be proud of. Our family used to be important people here in Edgerton. They took most of it away, but folks here remember, and that’s why we’re different from everyone else. You come from a special family.’
I sat on the living room rug and tried to see what was special in my aunts and uncles. The detectives had solved the weekly murder, and the aunts had come inside to sit on the green davenport and enjoy their favorite program. From my low, sidelong perspective, Nettie and May resembled monuments of Egyptian statuary. Their massive bodies in shapeless print dresses reared up side by side above four hugely stationary legs. In a sleeveless mesh T-shirt, his suspenders clipped to the waistband of tan gabardine trousers, Uncle Clark was canted back in his easy chair, his wide mouth twisted into a sneer. Eyes closed, arms folded over his chest, Uncle James filled the high-backed rocker. A man with wavy blond hair and an aristocratic profile was sawing away at a violin.
‘Mr Florian Zabach has a gift which comes straight from God,’ said Aunt Nettie. ‘I never heard prettier sounds in all my life.’
‘Remember the time we went up to Chicago and saw Eddie South?’ said Uncle Clark.
‘Eddie South brought a beautiful tone out of his fiddle,’ said Aunt May. ‘I have wondered if he might have been one of our category. A number of musicians are, I believe.’
‘Little pitchers,’ Nettie said. ‘Mind what you say.’
Uncle James snorted and stirred, and the other three looked at him until his chin dropped as far as his redwood neck would permit.
‘That tone was why they called Eddie South “The Dark Angel of the Violin,”’ Uncle Clark said. ‘But if Stuff Smith got up there, he’d gobble your Florsheim Swayback down in one bite.’
‘Nettie,’ said Aunt May, ‘I believe Mr Welk is putting on some weight.’
My eyelids sagged, and I pushed myself upright before I fell asleep in the living room, like Uncle James.
My mother woke me up when she let herself into our room. I waited while she took off her clothes, put on her nightshirt, and found her way to bed. I heard her yank up the sheet and wrestle her pillow into shape. She had carried into the room an odor of smoke and beer mingled with fresh air and summer rainfall, and I tried to sort out these traces of her evening’s history as she relaxed into sleep. Her breathing stretched out and slowed down. When I heard it catch in her throat and release itself in what was almost a snore, I crept across and crawled in beside her. Star seemed enormous, a huge female animal still wrapped in the atmosphere of the adventures through which she had passed on her way home. I nestled my back against hers. My body instantly doubled in weight and began to slip toward the center of the earth, where my hero father lay buried. Star shuddered and spoke a single word I trapped in my hands as I plummeted out of consciousness. Rinehart.
4
At the whispery pop of a seam I looked over my shoulder, saw a shadow fleeing down sunny Cherry Street, and fell bang on my bottom in surprise. At least once a week during my childhood and adolescence, this happened the moment my head hit the pillow. My shadow elongated over the white sidewalk and bent sideways to slip around the corner. The terror of an irredeemable loss immobilized me on the warm pavement. I got up, ran to the corner, and saw my shadow floating like a solid substance above the sidewalk ahead. When I pounded forward, the sidewalk tilted like a slide, and the familiar houses and dark porches softened in the heat.
Edgerton was gone.
I ran down a beaten track leading to a narrow river and an arched wooden bridge. The upright shadow scampered on. On the far side of the bridge, a line of stunted trees marked the beginning of a forest. I glimpsed the peaked roof and broken upper windows of an abandoned house above the treetops. My shadow moved up the arch of the bridge, leaned on the curved iron railing, and crossed one foot over the other. It faced me without having turned around.
Like an optical illusion, the mocking shadow receded with every stride I took. When finally I stood on the bridge, the shadow regarded me from fifty feet away and a point well above my head.
‘You seem to be trying to catch me,’ my shadow said.
‘I need you,’ I said.
‘Then you’d better come along.’ The shadow did its trick of switching front and back and moved on.
By the time I reached the top of the arch, the shadow was far down the descending slope. The iron handrails had become slim and delicate, and the planks bent beneath my weight.
The shadow patted the railing. ‘The longer it gets, the thinner it becomes. Like toffee. In the end, it disappears.’
‘Can I get to the other end?’
‘Maybe, if you get into some fancy sliding, use your momentum.’
‘We need each other,’ I said. ‘We’re the same thing.’
‘You are me, and I am you, yes,’ said the shadow. ‘But only in the sense that we each have qualities the other lacks. Unfortunately, your qualities are boring.’
‘Boring?’
‘Dear me, am I doing the right thing? What do other people think of me? Why don’t they like me?’ The shadow flicked its hands in the air, as if to scatter a cloud of gnats. ‘I don’t give a damn what people think of me.’
‘You’re a shadow,’ I said. ‘People don’t think about you at all.’
‘Then why care about getting me back?’
I had no answer for that.
‘You won’t even be able to go out by yourself at night for another six or seven years. When do we have our first cigarette? Our first drink? When do we get to have actual sex?’ He shook his head in disgust. ‘I want darkness, I want night. I want to see a big steak in front of me and a glass of whiskey beside the plate. I want cards in my hand and a cigar in my mouth and a little grown-up fun, and, kid, with you, it’s going to be too much work to get them.’
‘Without me, you can’t get them at all,’ I said.
‘On the contrary. Without you, I can do whatever I like. If you catch me, I have to come back, but I won’t be easy to catch, and you’ll be in considerable danger during the pursuit.’
‘What kind of danger?’ I asked.
‘That kind, for one.’ He swept his arm toward the forest. Imaginary blue fire flickered from branch to branch. My heart went cold and my mind became a stone.
5
Four years before the dream I just described started wrecking my sleep two or three nights every month, my aunts and uncles had seen conclusive proof of their doubts that Star could produce an undamaged child. I hope they were gratified. I was not. I had been looking forward to my third birthday.
I can remember the balloons bobbing on the clotheslines and the big ladder between the house and the picnic table, and I know what I was wearing. Among the few of my mother’s possessions I retain is a photograph of me in the striped T-shirt and new dungarees given me by Queenie. I have to tell the truth: I was an angelic child. If I saw a kid like that, I’d tuck a dollar into his hand for sheer good luck. Mine, I mean, not his. But when I look at his cherub face I have to wonder what this little smiling boy is concealing.
That is:
I wonder if he has begun to feel a mild, increasing tingle like an electric current pass up his arms and into his chest. I wonder if his mouth feels dry, if the colors striped across his shirt and the vibrant reds and yellows of the balloons have begun to glow. That angelic boy in his birthday-boy clothes may have felt the tightening of the screws at the heart of the world, but he has no idea of the misery speeding toward him. He has not yet seen the first sly tongues of the blue fire.
The aunts and uncles, my grandmother, and my mother must have spent much of the morning preparing the scene. Someone had blown up the balloons and used the ladder to fasten them to the clotheslines. A paper tablecloth printed with birthday cakes and candles had been stretched out across the picnic table and arrayed with paper plates, plastic cups, and cutlery. (Now that I know how they managed to get all this stuff, I pity the owner of the local five-and-dime.) Jugs of fresh lemonade and cherry Kool-Aid and the containers of food held down the tablecloth. Aunt Nettie had made a tuna casserole, Aunt May brought over a tray of fried chicken, and Queenie had baked her legendary sweet-potato pie. Reclusive Uncle Clarence and Aunt Joy had consented to emerge from their house across the street, a building so forbidding and funny smelling I dreaded entering it. Clarence brought along his banjo. Joy contributed a loaf of her black-olive bread. Star made lime Jell-O and the birthday cake, angel food with chocolate frosting. I can remember Toby Kraft, his face so white he reminded me of Casper the Friendly Ghost, strutting around the table and patting people on the back.
They must have gossiped, they must have told stories and teased one another as they dug into the fried chicken. I can’t remember that any more than I can remember the actual disaster itself. What I can remember – the most commanding mental photograph I retain from my third birthday – is an image so dissonant that it sank indelibly into me.
It begins with a sudden awareness of the warmth and color of the light, as if I had never before really noticed how this rich, vibrant substance streamed from above to coat the world like a liquid. I saw the brightness gather in a shining skin on the backs of my mother’s hands. Then the earth opened beneath me, and I plummeted downward and away from the picnic table, too startled to be frightened. I came to rest and found myself in a large, untidy room. Books covered a table and stood in piles on the floor. In the distance, an embittered voice ranted about smoke and gold. My eyes fastened on the mantel, where a fern drooped beside a fox stepping delicately toward the edge of a glass dome. The weights of a brass clock swung this way – that way on the other side of the fox’s confinement. I had been pushed back: I was in the museum of the past.
It ended so quickly that I did not have time to react. In the space between two halves of a second I had traveled at enormous speed back to my chair at the picnic table, restored to the present. A fraction of a beat ahead of the moment when I had seen the sunlight glowing on my mother’s hands, Uncle James was still telling the same joke to Uncle Clark, Aunt May still smiling at compliments to her fried chicken – I’m inventing these details to suggest the normality of the scene, but all I remember is what I just described. By then, the sensations in my body would have built to an almost unbearable pitch.
‘You scrambled off the picnic bench,’ Star told me, not once but many times, retelling this story to help herself deal with it. ‘I asked if anything was wrong, but you just put your hands over your eyes and started running. Toby tried to grab you, but you scooted past him and ran right into that ladder. Down it went, I don’t know how a little thing like you had the strength, the ladder fell smash into the table, right next to my mother. Food went flying straight up in the air. Clarence was pouring Kool-Aid into his cup, and the jug got away from him and landed in the cake.
‘After you got past the top of the table, you fell down flat and stiffened up like a board. The spasms hit you so hard you bounced off the ground. Foam was coming out of your mouth. I heard Uncle Clark say something about rabies, and I clouted him on the side of his head without even breaking stride. Some of those people were so busy mopping at themselves and taking care of Momma, they didn’t know what was happening to you! I swear, I was so scared I thought I was going to faint. When I got my arms around you, I couldn’t even hold you still.
‘Then you went limp. I picked you up and put you to bed. After a while, Nettie and May came in to feel your forehead and tell me about everybody they ever knew who had fits. I put up with it as long as I could, and then I shooed them out.
‘The doctor said it could have been anything. Too much excitement. Dehydration. He picked you up and put you on his lap and said, “Neddie, your mommy says you put your hands over your eyes before all the trouble started. Was that because you saw something you didn’t like?”’
What age was I, when she slipped that in? Eight?
‘Now, that struck me, because I was wondering the same thing. You were too young to answer him, and besides, I don’t think you remembered anything that happened. But, honey, you covered your eyes the next year, too, and you did it again on your fifth birthday. Did you see something that made you unhappy?’
I never told Star what happened during my ‘attacks.’ For a long time, I would not have known how to describe those visions, and later on I was afraid of sounding crazy. It was bad enough that other people saw me thrashing on the ground – it would have been worse if they had known what was going on inside.
Even now, writing about this is like trying to reconstruct a half-destroyed mosaic. Many patterns and images seem possible, and even after you think you have identified the design, you cannot be certain that you have not merely imposed it. From the border, men and women attend or not to what is represented in the missing section. Some smile, some appear to be frozen in wonderment or shock. Others look away: have they chosen to ignore the enigmatic event or not yet noticed it?
6
The internal story of my third birthday cannot ever be reconstructed. The people arranged around its borders, my aunts and uncles, my grandmother, Toby Kraft, are staring at a blankness. My mother holds me in her arms, but she has averted her head.
The path to wisdom leads downward, and anyone who decides to take it had better buckle on armor, remember to bring a sword, and get used to the idea that when and if he gets back everyone he talks to is going to think he’s a phony.
7
It would have looked like this:
Through walls of blue fire I follow a being into the ordinary world, and we are standing before a house with a basketball hoop hung over the garage door and a bicycle canted over its kickstand at the edge of the driveway. The lighted windows glow a luminous turquoise, and the dark windows shine blue-black. There is a number on the front door and I can see a street sign, but since I am three and cannot read, these things are symbols without meanings. At once completely unknown and deeply familiar, the being beside me frightens me like Aunt Nettie’s stories of the Bogeyman. The brim of his black hat shades his face. His coat nearly touches the ground.
In my terror I turn away and see the dark shapes of mountains rising like animals into the sky. Blue starlight defines the jagged ridges and gleams from vertical snowfields. The air smells like Christmas trees.
The being moves forward, and a pressure like a tide urges me along in his wake. He turns to the front door and moves onto a welcome mat. Gleeful flames swarm around him. He reaches into his coat with one hand and pushes the doorbell with the other. He doesn’t have to use the bell, he could melt through the door if he felt like it, but ringing the bell amuses him. Then, as if because of my insight, I am within the being and looking horrified through his eyes. I see a blue-white hand pull a knife from the depths of the black coat. Flame moves along the blade. The unopened door is a blue tissue.
On the other side of the shimmering tissue a heavyset man in jeans and a sweatshirt approaches. His pulled-down mouth tells me that he is annoyed. He engulfs the doorknob in his free hand, and as he turns it steps forward to block the doorway. This takes place in seconds. When the man opens the door and thrusts himself forward, I try to wrench free of the being. A force clamps down to hold me still. Before me, the man’s eyes flare and darken. I try to scream, but my mouth is not mine and will not obey. We follow the man through the door, and the blue fire surges in with us. For a second that is like a dance the man’s right leg glides back and our left leg glides forward and we move together in unison. He bends to get away, and we bend with him. His teeth shine milky blue.
The knife slides into the band of flesh between the bottom of his sweatshirt and the waist of his jeans. The man breaks the dance by going still. We lean into him so closely that our chin rubs his cheek. He makes a sound and puts his hands on our shoulders and straightens up, and then we are back in the dance. We move behind him and pull up on the knife. His knees dip. Black in the trembling blue light, a sheet of blood cascades over his jeans. A silver rope emerges. Another rope slides out. I feel a relaxation around me and break free.
Then I am standing behind the being, and I can do nothing but witness what I cannot understand.
The man lowers his hands to the ropes and holds them as if making an offering. Slowly, he tries to move the ropes back inside his body.
The being says, ‘Mr Anscombe, I presume?’ His voice tells me that this, too, amuses him.
Down the side of the room, blue flames swarm across the wall and form a glowing transparency through which I can see a woman in a nightdress sitting on a bed with a little girl on her lap. She holds a book but has stopped reading to look at the place in the wall where the door must be.
She can’t see how the man is trying to stay on his feet, stepping a little bit forward, then a little bit back, or how his knees sag until he sinks all the way to the floor, all the time staring at the fat loops falling out of his hands. The being leans down, sets the knife hard against the side of the man’s neck and jerks it across. Black fluid streams over the sweatshirt, and in the center of the stream a bump rises and falls, bump bump bump. The man tilts over his knees and keeps on tilting with the same amazing slowness until his forehead meets the carpet. The being steps back. Beneath the shadow of his hat, a blank pane of darkness ends in a strip of jaw.
I understand: He is Mr X.
Luxuriantly, Mr X turns to gaze through the blue veils at the woman and the little girl on the side of the bed.
The dying man makes an airy sound. The woman pats her little girl’s head.
In delight, the being moves forward, and the veils reshape themselves into a bright tunnel. Without warning, the wind presses me forward in his wake. A mild, almost weightless resistance like that of a spiderweb yields instantly as I pass through the invisible wall. On all sides, the blue tunnel hums like electricity. Mr X strides ahead, and he, too, hums with his own electricity, which is joy. His next stride carries him into the bedroom, and although his body conceals the woman and child from me I hear a woman’s gasp. The child begins whimpering. They have seen a man in a black coat and hat walk straight through the bedroom wall. The woman scrambles across the bed, and I see bare legs flashing blue-white.
Clamping the little girl to her chest, the woman spins off the far side of the bed and hits the dresser. They have shiny, dark brown, just-washed hair and immense dark eyes. I step back, and the little girl’s eyes glance in my direction, more as if looking for than at me. When I try to retreat into the tunnel, the pressure slides against my back.
The girl buries her face in her mother’s chest, and the mother hoists her up. She is as pretty as a movie star. ‘I want you to get out of here right now, whoever you are,’ she says.
Concealing the knife in the folds of his coat, he moves along the bottom of the bed. She backs against the wall and shouts, ‘Mike!’
‘No help from that quarter, Mrs Anscombe,’ he says. ‘Tell me, don’t you find it awfully dull out here in the sticks?’
‘My name isn’t Anscombe,’ she says. ‘I don’t know anyone named Anscombe. You’re making a terrible mistake.’
He comes toward her. ‘Someone did, anyhow.’
She springs onto the bed. Her legs churn. Mr X wraps a hand around her ankle. The nightdress slides up over her hips when he pulls her toward him. She releases the little girl and shouts, ‘Run, baby! Run outside and hide!’
He yanks the woman off the bed and kicks her in the stomach. The little girl stares at him. He flicks a hand at her, and she shuffles an inch forward on her knees. ‘Too cold outside for a nice baby,’ he says. ‘Dangerous. Baby might meet a big, bad bear.’
The woman struggles to her feet and stands with her hands pressed against her stomach. Her eyes are like water. ‘Run, Lisa!’ she hisses. ‘Run away!’
He waves the knife at the woman, playfully. His teeth glint. ‘Baby Lisa doesn’t like bears,’ he says. ‘Does she, Lisa?’
Baby Lisa shakes her head.
‘Do anything you like to me,’ the woman says. ‘Just don’t hurt my baby. No matter who you are, she doesn’t have anything to do with why you’re here. Please.’
‘Oh,’ he says with what sounds like real curiosity, ‘why am I here?’
She leaps toward him, and he whirls out of her path and knocks her to the floor. He bends down, grabs her hair, hauls her to her feet, and throws her back against the wall. ‘Was there an answer to that question?’ he asks.
Then the terrible thing happens again. A giant hand seizes me and rips me from my body. I am nothing but a shadow-space that looks out through his eyes. In panic and terror I fight to escape but cannot. This always happened. The clamps knew me, they held me in a knowing accommodation. Through his eyes I see more than I can through my own – it’s true, she is almost as pretty as a movie star, but her face, chipped by too much experience, would look bitter on the screen. An unhappy knowledge moves into her eyes.
She says, ‘So I guess this is what happened to the Bookers.’
I gather and flex myself, and the restraints drop away. With no transition, I am back in my body, looking across the bed where the baby named Lisa kneels on the covers.
‘Should I know that name?’ asks Mr X. ‘By the way, isn’t there a little boy in the Anscombe family?’
‘He’s gone,’ she says.
He says nothing.
‘I don’t know where,’ she says. ‘You don’t have to hurt my baby.’
‘I wouldn’t hurt an innocent child.’ He summons the girl. She creeps across the blanket, and he scoops her up. ‘But I often wonder why the very people who should know better think that this is a benign universe.’ He anchors the child in the crook of his elbow, grips the top of her head, and twists. There is an audible snap and the child sags.
I don’t want to go on, it’s all wrong anyhow, I kept mixing up the details because the actual memory was too painful. That time, the name wasn’t Anscombe. Anscombe came in later.
8 Mr X
It took me an absurdly long time to understand who and what I was. You, my Masters, had it easy by comparison, and I beg You to understand the nature of my struggle.
Until I reached that cataclysm known as adolescence, my impersonation of an ordinary child met with passable success. That in the course of a schoolyard brawl I was sufficiently provoked by a fellow second-grader named Lenny Beech as to batter his blond head against the cement was put down to his remark that I was a piece of dog poo-poo. That I was obliged to repeat the third grade was explained by what the administration described as my ‘daydreaming,’ my ‘inability to pay attention during class,’ and the like, a reference to my habit of completing assignments any old way I felt like, so that when asked to write about My Favorite Christmas I might hand in a page filled with question marks, or in answer to a sheet of subtraction problems, submit a drawing of a monster eating a dog. The word creative came in handy, although it failed to appease the parents of Maureen Orth, a scrawny nonentity with overlapping front teeth whom I talked into letting me strip naked and tie to a birch tree in Johnson’s Woods when we were in the eighth grade. Maureen had been grateful for my attentions until I reminded her that wild Indians, one of which I was pretending to be, customarily tortured their captives, one of which she was pretending to be. The pathetic screams induced by the sight of my penknife led me to untie her, and she would not listen to my avowals that I never intended to cause her any actual harm.
In the end, my father wrote Mr Orth a check for a thousand dollars, and that was that, apart from the grumbling.
My father cut my allowance in half, ‘for,’ as he put it, ‘encouraging that creature’s attentions,’ and my mother wiped her eyes and forbade me ever again to go into Johnson’s Woods.
Of course I had no intention of obeying. Thirty acres so thick with pines, birches, maples, and hickory that sunlight pierced their canopy only in shimmering, coin-shaped spangles and containing, like an emerald hidden in a bowl of pennies, the mysterious ruins into which I would have dragged Maureen Orth had she been up to snuff, Johnson’s Woods was sacred ground to me.
All that was left of property which otherwise had been transformed into streets lined with houses for the people my father called ‘the rising scum,’ the woods were mine not because they belonged to my family, but because they had spoken to me the first time I really looked at them.
I must have been transported past Johnson’s Woods hundreds of times before I looked through the rear window of the bus delivering Edgerton Academy’s sixth grade to Pioneer Village and felt a fishhook strike my heart as a voice out there or inside my head boomed Come to me. Words of that order. You need me, You are mine, Be with me, whatever. The fishhook tried to pull me through the window, and I turned around and pushed against the glass. My heart pounded, my face blazed. The driver yelled an order to sit down. In justifiable expectation of fireworks, my classmates snickered, but fell silent as soon as I obeyed. The astonished teacher thanked me for my cooperation. I wasn’t being cooperative. I wasn’t strong enough to push out the window.
Pioneer Village was two streets lined with log cabins and the Meeting House, the Place of Worship, the Trading Post, and the Smithy. Women in frilly caps cooked in big pots hung over fireplaces, and men in coonskin caps and gunnysack shirts shot rabbits with muskets. These people grew vegetables and made their own soap. Their hair was stiff with grease, and nobody looked too clean. I believe they were adepts of some punitive faith.
Rendering unto Caesar what was Caesar’s, I stumbled through the day and got back on the bus ahead of everybody else. When we passed the woods on the way home, I twisted sideways on my seat and waited for that tug at my inmost being and the booming voice I alone would hear. Instead, I felt only a warm, powerful pulsation – it was enough.
Blessedly, the next day was Saturday. I arose with the sun and idled around the house until my mother appeared to make breakfast. My father took off on a business errand, which was what he did on Saturdays. With premature cunning, I told my mother that I thought I’d ride my bike for a while. On my usual Saturdays, I wandered down Manor Street in a black, bored rage, scratching the sides of our neighbors’ cars and crouching under a bush to shoot passing dogs with my BB gun. That I wanted to do something as conventional as ride my bike filled my mother with a pleasure tainted only mildly with suspicion. I promised not to get into trouble. Because I had no choice, I also promised to come home for lunch. I could see her consider giving me a hug, and, to our mutual relief, veto the notion. I pedaled down the driveway in a flawless impersonation of a kid with nothing special on his mind. The second I got out of sight, I stood up on the pedals and made that clunker fly.
At the place in the road where I had felt the tug and heard the wondrous voice, I dragged the bike behind a tree and stood up straight, knowing I was in the right place, the place I was supposed to be. I stepped forward, trembling with anticipation. Nothing happened. In a manner of speaking. Nothing happened except for the subtly intensifying awareness of having arrived within that space in the world most connected to the secret sources of all that made my life a furious misery, therefore the space most necessary to me and for the same reasons the most terrifying.
At that moment, I realized that I had already chosen knowledge over ignorance, whatever the consequences. My heart calmed, and I began to take in what was around me.
The trunks of many trees filled my vision, brown, gray, silver, some almost black, their hides varied from wrinkled corrugations to perfect shining smoothness. Trembling pools of light lay across the gray-green floor. The air was a floating, silvery gray. Far off loomed the wooden mountain of a deadfall. Overhead, leafy crowns knitted together, and squirrels’ nests sat on upper branches like ragged bolls.
Then, as if they had come into being all at once, I could see the squirrels everywhere, leaping from branches, landing on twiggy shoots, and swaying downward to rocket up again in an endless chase. Birds of all descriptions crisscrossed the gauzy air. A fox materialized within a cube of empty air, pricked up its ears, and stopped moving with one paw still raised.
On the last Sunday before summer vacation, when coincidentally or not Canon Reed had spent the morning vainly attempting to take the sting out of Luke 12:49, I came to cast fire upon the earth, and would have it that it were already kindled!, I saw the first faint traces of the blue fire and knew that the summer would be a time of wonders.
Intermittent, vertical strips of pale green appeared and coalesced between the more distant trees. When I came nearer, I saw that I was approaching a clearing. I reached the last of the trees. Before me was a grassy oval, unnervingly quiet. Unobstructed sun beat down upon a pad of yellow-green grasses.
As soon as I moved out from beneath the canopy, the temperature heated up but good. I could hardly see, in all that brightness. At the center of the clearing, I sat down with my eyes just above the top of the grass. A flattened trail arrowed toward me. I wiped my forehead and blinked against the dazzle of the sun. When I breathed in, the clearing breathed with me. An electric current ran up my arms and into my chest.
I knew awe and pleasure. I knew more was to come. Within the me within the clearing sat a me who needed time to get used to his surroundings. We sat together in our different realms and adjusted to our new conditions. There would be more, but the nature of the more could not as yet be imagined.
A bluebird ventured out of the woods, and I tracked its arrogant, overhead loop.
Within, my newborn self spoke, and I sent a thought flying to the bluebird. As quick as anything, that bluebird crumpled its wings and fell, lifeless as an anvil.
On the way home, I tried to do the same to a crow sneering at me from a telephone wire, but the blasted thing refused to drop dead. So did a holstein ruminating behind a fence at the edge of the road, and I had no better luck with Sarge, an elderly police dog twitching in sleep on his owner’s front lawn. I had been given a tool that had come without an instruction manual. Thinking as a child, I assumed that installments of the instruction manual were to be steadily delivered over a reasonable time.
Little did I know.
9
Because my board scores were surprisingly good, I wound up being accepted by all four of the colleges I applied to. As a product of foster care whose only legal parent made so little money she had never even filed with the IRS, I was offered full-tuition scholarships, free housing, and a variety of jobs at each school, so I did not have to count on Phil Grant to lay out the customary fortune. He would have refinanced his house and taken out loans to keep him in debt until retirement, if that was what I needed. That I would not be costing Phil a lot of money made me happy, but most of my happiness was relief.
In the end, I decided on Middlemount, disappointing Phil, who had all but assumed since my acceptance at Princeton, his alma mater, that I would wind up there. I couldn’t see myself at such a high-pressure school, and I didn’t like the idea of being surrounded by a lot of rich kids. Also, although I never mentioned it during our talks over the kitchen table, I knew that in spite of all the financial aid, Princeton would take more money out of Phil’s pocket than Middlemount. On the sensible grounds that we were talking about my decision, not his, Laura took my side in these discussions, which helped him come around. So I went to Middlemount College in Middlemount, Vermont, and my life began to unravel.
When my jock roommate followed his instantaneous loathing of everything I represented by crowding great numbers of his prepschool chums into our room night after night to yell about fags, niggers, kikes, car wrecks, sailing catastrophes, broken backs, broken necks, instances of total paralysis, kikes, fags, spics, and niggers, I complained loudly enough to get reassigned to a single room.
Once I got a single room I hardly saw anyone at all outside of classes. In spite of my SAT scores, my math and science courses seemed to be conducted in a foreign language. I had to struggle up to and past exhaustion just to lag behind. Sometimes I looked up from my desk at a string of gibberish Professor Flagship, the calculus teacher, was scrolling across the blackboard and felt myself fall through a hole in the earth’s crust. I spent whole weeks doing nothing but shuttling between the dorm, classrooms, my meal job, and the library. Then it started to get cold.
Winter hit Vermont right after Thanksgiving. The temperature sank to twenty degrees, and the cold gripped my skin like a claw. When it went down to ten degrees, the wind rolling down out of the mountains threatened to tear off my face. In the overheated classrooms, I could feel the cold moving into the marrow of my bones. For two months, the sun retreated behind a lead-lined curtain the color of gray flannel. Before long, starless night clamped down abruptly at 5:00. The worst cold of my life brought on perpetual sneezing and coughing and sent aches to every part of my body. I trudged to classes, but the supervisor at my meal job declared me a health hazard and granted sick leave. After forcing down whatever I could of the cafeteria’s starchy dinners, too tired to face another Nanook-style trek across the tundra to the library, I fell asleep at my desk while trying to cram Introductory Calculus into my stupefied head. Daily, second by second, I was being ersased into a shadow.
The one thing that kept me from feeling as though I already had become a shadow was my guitar and what happened when I played it. For my twelfth birthday, which had not failed to be marked by the usual horror show, the Grants had given me a nice old Gibson, along with what turned out to be years of lessons from a sympathetic teacher. I brought my guitar with me to Middlemount, and now and then when my room closed in around me, I went to a corner of the dorm’s lounge and played there.
Mostly, I added voicings to harmonies in my dogged, step-by-step way, but sometimes other students came in and sat close enough to listen. When I found that I had an audience, I played things like a Bach fugue my teacher had transcribed, a blues line I learned off a Gene Ammons record, and a version of ‘Things Ain’t What They Used to Be’ cribbed from Jim Hall. If anyone was still listening, I threw in a few songs whose chord changes I could remember. ‘My Romance’ was one, and ‘Easy Living,’ ‘Moonlight in Vermont,’ and a jazz tune called ‘Whisper Not.’ I made mistakes and got lost, but none of my fellow dormies knew anything was wrong unless I stopped and went back to where I’d been before my fingers turned into Popsicle sticks. Half of them never listened to anything but the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, and Tina Turner, and the other half never listened to anything but the Carpenters, the Bee Gees, and Elton John. (The ones that always wore black and listened to Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen avoided the lounge like the plague.) What I played sounded like classical music to most of them, but they liked it anyhow. And I liked playing for them, because it reminded me that I had not always been a hermit. The other happy result of my playing was the renovation of my public identity from That Weird Ned Guy Who Never Comes Out of His Room to That Freaky Ned Who Can Play Really Good Guitar Once He Gets Out of His Room.
At Christmas break, I went back to Naperville and acted as though everything was fine, apart from some trouble with calculus. Without telling any actual lies, I described a challenging routine of work and occasional pleasures, and put down my unhappiness to homesickness. As soon as I said the word, I realized that I had been more homesick for Naperville and the Grants than I had been willing to admit. As my cold lessened and I alternated between writing a paper for English, reviewing notes for my final exams, and settling back into my old place in the household, the version of college life I had invented began to seem less fictional and more like the reality I would have known had I not felt so lost.
The day after Christmas, I heard a car turn into the driveway and went to the living room window to watch Star wheel up to the garage in a handsome old Lincoln. She emerged wearing high heels, an elaborate hat, and a black coat too light for the cold. Star was living in Cleveland that year, exchanging work at a lithography studio for lessons from an artist she had met while he was in residence at Albertus. On weekends, she was singing in a club called Inside the Outside. Laura Grant called out from the kitchen, ‘Ned, your mother’s here!’ Buttoning his blazer and sucking in his tummy, Phil came out of the alcove off the living room, where he watched television. ‘Don’t make her freeze out there, kiddo,’ he said. Star was hurrying up the flagstone path, and when I opened the door she sailed in like a swan, hiding her nervousness behind a brilliant smile. She put her arms around me, and the Grants both started talking at once, and I could feel her begin to calm down.
The rest of the day was comfortable and relaxed. Star gave me a cashmere sweater, I gave her a boxed set of Billie Holiday reissues, and what she got from the Grants nicely balanced the few little things she had brought for them. Laura prepared two lavish meals, and I continued to develop my sanitized version of life at Middlemount. Phil and Laura left us alone after dinner, and Star asked, ‘Are you thinking about being a musician? I sure liked hearing about you playing for your friends at that school.’
I told her that I’d never be good enough to satisfy myself.
‘You could be better than you are now,’ she said, ‘and you’d be able to work, so you could leave college, if you wanted to. If any of the musicians I know have college degrees, they keep it a secret.’
Surprised, I asked her why I would want to leave college.
‘Know how you sound when you talk about Middlemount?’ she asked. ‘Like you’re describing a movie.’
‘It’s a good college.’
‘You don’t have to tell me it’s a good college. I just wonder if it’s a good college for Ned Dunstan. Look at you. You lost about fifteen, twenty pounds, and you’ve been missing way too much sleep. The only reason you’re halfway healthy is Laura’s been giving you plenty of her good food.’
‘I had a rotten cold,’ I said.
‘Your cold wasn’t all that was rotten, if you ask me. Maybe you want to make college sound better than it is.’
‘After I get through the finals, everything’ll be fine,’ I said. Phil and Laura came in offering coffee and nightcaps, and before everybody went to bed we listened to the eighteen-year-old Billie Holiday singing ‘When You’re Smiling’ and ‘Ooh Ooh Ooh, What a Little Moonlight Can Do.’
The next morning Laura and Star went out shopping, and Star came home with a new coat from Biegelman’s purchased at 60 percent off because Mr Biegelman thought it would never look as good on anyone else. As Laura told the story, she gave me a sideways look that was half question, half accusation. Star seemed to be avoiding looking at me altogether. Laura finished talking and my mother left to hang up the coat. She gave me a murky glance on her way out of the room. Phil noticed nothing, for which I was grateful. Laura said, ‘Did you boys stay home all the time we were out?’
‘You bet,’ Phil said. ‘We had a hell of a time kicking out the dancing girls before you got back.’
My mother drifted into the living room, smiled more in my direction than at me, and glanced at the couch like a cat deciding where to settle down. Phil cleared his throat and challenged her to their annual Christmas chess championship. She grinned at him with what looked to me like relief.
Before the start of this tradition, I would have said that given two tries at telling a pawn from a rook, my mother would have been right at least once, but she was good enough to beat Phil about one game in four. This time, he was frowning at the board and muttering, ‘Hold on, I don’t get it,’ ten minutes after they started. (It turned out that the lithographer in Cleveland was a demon chess player.)
I followed Laura into the kitchen, expecting her to share my amusement at her husband’s consternation. ‘Either she got a lot better since last year, or Phil forgot how to play,’ I said.
Laura moved across the kitchen, leaned against the sink, and permitted my remark to shrivel in the air between us. The look she gave me had nothing to do with amusement. ‘I thought I knew you pretty well, but now I’m beginning to wonder.’ She crossed her arms across her chest.
‘About what?’
‘Did you leave the house while we were gone?’
I shook my head.
‘You didn’t go downtown. Or to Biegelman’s.’
‘What’s all this about? You and Star have been acting weird ever since you got back.’
‘That’s not an answer.’ She was staring fiercely into my eyes.
‘No,’ I said, beginning to get irritated. ‘I didn’t go to Biegelman’s. Biegelman’s is a woman’s clothing store. I don’t think I’ve ever been inside it in my whole life.’ I made myself calm down. ‘What’s going on?’
‘A mistake, I guess,’ Laura said.
In the other room, my mother laughed and cried out, ‘Phil, don’t you know anything about Capablanca?’
‘He’s dead, and so am I,’ Phil said.
‘Star’s worried about you.’ Laura was still searching my face.
‘There’s nothing to worry about.’
‘Are you getting enough sleep? Do you walk around feeling exhausted all the time?’
Most of the time, I walked around feeling half-dead. ‘I’m tired sometimes, but it’s no big deal.’
‘Are you happy at Middlemount? If it’s getting to be too much for you, you can always take a semester off.’
I began to get angry all over again. ‘First everybody is pushing me into college, and now everybody wants to push me out. I wish you’d make up your minds.’
She looked stricken. ‘Ned, did we push you into college? Is that how it feels to you?’
I already regretted my words.
‘Think of how much those colleges wanted you. It’s a great opportunity. Besides that, not having a college degree would be a tremendous disadvantage later in life.’ She lifted her chin and looked away. ‘Boy oh boy. Maybe we did push you. But all we wanted was what we thought would be best for you.’ She looked back at me. ‘You’re the only person who can tell me what’s best for you, and you better be honest about it. Don’t worry about Phil, either. He feels the same way.’
She meant that she would be able to explain a leave of absence to him, if that was what I wanted. The thought of Phil’s disappointment made me feel like a traitor. ‘I guess I’ll have to get straight As and be elected president of my class before you and Star stop worrying,’ I said.
‘Hey, Ned!’ Phil shouted from the other room. ‘Your mother and Bobby Fischer, separated at birth, is that the deal?’
‘Okay,’ Laura said. ‘We’ll see how you feel at semester break. In the meantime, please remember that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, all right?’
Over lunch, the astonished Phil explained the Machiavellian stratagems by which my mother had sandbagged him. Star ate half of what was on her plate, looked at her watch, and stood up from the table. She had a long drive ahead of her, time to go, thanks so much, goodbye.
By the time I carried her bag downstairs, she was giving Laura a hug from the depths of her new winter coat. I walked her down the path to the Lincoln, wondering if she thought she could get in and drive away without speaking to me. We came up to the car door, and I said, ‘Mom.’ She wrapped me in her arms.
‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘Throw a few things into a suitcase and tell those nice people you’re going to stay with me while you think things over.’
‘What?’ I pulled back and looked at her. She was serious.
‘I have enough room to put you up. You can wait tables at Inside the Outside until we find something better.’
If she had sandbagged Phil, what she was doing to me felt like a mugging. ‘What’s going on? Laura’s after me about transferring or dropping out for a semester, you can’t even look at me, both of you act like I turned into some person you don’t even like … I’m not where I’m supposed to be, I’m too skinny, I’m a liar … All of a sudden, come to Cleveland …’ I raised my arms and shook my head in bafflement. ‘If you can, explain it to me, how about that?’
‘I want to protect you,’ she said.
I couldn’t help it – I laughed at her. ‘Middlemount’s a lot safer than a nightclub in the middle of Cleveland.’
Some thought, an explanation or rebuttal, surged across her face. She visibly thrust it away. ‘Maybe I never had a chance to go to college. But you know what? Working at Inside the Outside isn’t such a bad deal.’
I had offended her. Even worse, I had insulted her. ‘Hey, Mom, I never wanted to go to Middlemount, it just happened.’
‘Then get in the car.’
‘I can’t.’ In the face of her huge, silent challenge, I said, ‘I did have a lot of problems, but I can work them out.’
‘Uh-huh,’ she said. ‘The things you don’t know, they’d fill a football stadium.’
‘Like what?’ I said, remembering the refusal I had just seen.
‘You and me, honey, we don’t know anything at all.’ The warmth of the new coat enveloped me once more, and when I felt her arms and shoulders tremble as she kissed my cheek, I almost decided to climb into the old Lincoln and drive away. Star patted the back of my head twice, three times, waited a beat, then once more. ‘Get back inside before you freeze to death.’
I spent most of the next few days studying.
The Grants kept up a cheerful patter during the drive to O’Hare, though I could tell that Laura was still unhappy. Phil marveled at my mother’s progress in the year since their last championship. In the past, he had been able to predict her decisions three or four moves ahead. ‘I knew her game better than she knew mine. I could surprise her, whereas she always had to take chances to surprise me.’
‘Whereas?’ Laura said.
‘Yes. The point is, once you get to that stage, the situation never changes. But this year, Star figured out my strategies before I knew what they were. I thought she was just messing around until she started taking my pieces off the board. The level of her game went way past mine, which means that her ability is out of sight.’
‘Whereas yours is merely above average,’ Laura said from the back seat.
‘Why are you picking on me? Ned, she’s picking on me, isn’t she?’
‘Sounds like it,’ I said.
‘You in a bad mood, honey?’
‘I’m afraid of losing Ned.’
Phil looked at her in the rearview mirror. ‘We can’t get rid of the guy. He’s coming back in a couple of weeks.’
‘I hope he does,’ Laura said.
Phil glanced at me, then back up at the mirror. ‘After you two got back from downtown, Star seemed sort of antsy, like she was upset. Did she seem upset, Ned, when you were saying goodbye?’
‘More like worried,’ I said. ‘She wanted me to drive back to Cleveland with her.’
‘Oh, no,’ Laura said.
‘Just get in the car and drive away?’
‘After telling you I was leaving.’
Laura said, ‘I knew it,’ and Phil said, ‘I’ll be damned.’ He checked the mirror again. ‘What did you say?’
‘It’s not important.’
‘I don’t know,’ Phil said. ‘Ned, one thing about your mother, and I’ve always thought she was great –’
‘No kidding,’ Laura supplied.
‘You do, too, Laura, come on, one thing about Star, she’s full of surprises.’
I tried to say goodbye to the Grants at the security check, but they talked their way past the guards and walked me to the departure gate. We were about half an hour early. Phil wandered off to inspect a gift shop. Laura slumped against a square column and smiled at me from a face filled with complicated feeling. I remember thinking that she had never looked so beautiful, and that I had rarely been so conscious of how much I loved her. ‘At least you didn’t run away to Cleveland.’
‘I thought about it for a second or two,’ I said. ‘You knew what she was going to say?’
She nodded, and her warm eyes again met mine. ‘Star and I have some things in common, anyhow. We both want our Ned to be safe and happy.’
I looked down the corridor, where Phil was peering at a rack of baseball caps. ‘What was all that about Biegelman’s? When you and Star got back, you were mad at me, and she was in outer space.’
‘Forget about it, Ned, please. I made a mistake.’
‘You thought you saw me in Biegelman’s?’
Laura rammed her hands into the pockets of her down coat and bent her blue-jeaned right leg to plant the sole of a pretty black boot on the flank of the column. The back of her head fell against its flat surface. She turned her head toward the people moving up and down the corridor and smiled reflexively at a small boy encased in a snow-suit waddling ahead of his stroller.
‘There was a little more to it.’
A long stretch of corridor opened up in front of the boy, and he broke into a lumbering run until sheer momentum got the better of him. He flopped down onto the tiles, his arms and legs spread-eagled like a starfish. Without breaking stride, his mother leaned over, scooped him up, and dumped him into the stroller.
‘Eventually, I got tired of trailing after Star.’ Laura was watching the boy’s mother move efficiently down the corridor. ‘I love her a lot, Ned, but sometimes she can make it hard to give her what she needs.’ She turned her head and smiled at me again. ‘We got to Biegelman’s, she found exactly the right coat, it was on sale, we hadn’t seen anything else all morning, so it should have been simple. All right, it was a little expensive, but not much. I would have bought it for her in a second.’
I was thinking: The story always hides some other, secret story, the story you are not supposed to know.
‘But Star didn’t like my spending so much on her, so she had to play this game. The coat wasn’t the right color. Could the clerk see if they had one in a lighter color? It was obvious they only had that one, and the only woman in Naperville likely to buy it already had it on. Mr Biegelman came up to help, and I walked away. When I looked back, your mother was gone. Then I looked through the window, and there she was, out on the sidewalk in that coat. She was talking to you.’
‘Me?’
‘That’s how it looked,’ she said. ‘Star seemed so unhappy … so disturbed … I don’t know what. You, the person I thought was you, turned his back on her and walked away. I started to go toward the door, but Star came back in and gave me this look, so I didn’t say anything. Mr Biegelman gave us the extra discount, and I pulled out my credit card. But I did ask her about it on the way home.’
‘What did she say about the guy?’
Laura pushed herself off the pillar. ‘First she said there wasn’t any guy. Then she said, oh, she forgot, a stranger came up and asked for directions. Then she cried. She didn’t want me to notice, and to tell you the truth, I was a lot more interested in what you’d have to say, because Star wasn’t about to tell me anything at all. But it wasn’t you, so I made a mistake. Obviously.’
‘I guess so,’ I said.
My flight was announced, and Phil pulled me into an embrace and told me he was proud of me. Laura’s hug was longer and tighter than Phil’s. I told her I loved her, and she said the same to me. I surrendered my ticket, stepped into the mouth of the jetway, and looked back. Phil was smiling and Laura was staring at me as though memorizing my face. I waved goodbye. Identically, like witnesses being sworn in at a trial, they raised their right hands. Other passengers swept forward in a confusion of ski jackets and carry-on bags and urged me down the jetway.
10
Middlemount closed around me like a fist. In the week before finals, I sank deeper into the old pattern, rushing under metal skies between classes, the meal job, and the library, often falling asleep with my churning head on an open book. Sometimes it seemed as though I had passed from one frozen night into another without the intervention of daylight; sometimes I looked at my watch, saw the hands pointing to four o’clock, and could not tell if I had missed some badly needed sleep or a couple of classes and an appearance before the pots and pans.
On the first day of finals I had the English and French exams, history on the second day, then a day off, chemistry on the next, and calculus on the final day. Through Monday and Tuesday I can remember coming into the bright classrooms, taking my seat, getting the blue books and the exam sheets, and thinking myself so far behind that I was incapable even of understanding the questions. Then the words began to sink in, the darkness to lift, and soon, as if more by radio transmission than by thought, coherent sentences declared themselves in my mind. I took dictation until the blue books were filled, and then I stopped.
On Wednesday night I fell asleep at my desk. Raps at the door jolted me awake. When I opened it, I was startled to see Simone Feigenbaum, a girl from my French class, standing in front of me, dressed, as always, in black. Simone was from Scarsdale. She smoked Gitanes and was in the Bob Dylan – Leonard Cohen crowd. The thought that she probably wanted to borrow a textbook evaporated as she flowed in and put her arms around me. In the midst of a lengthy kiss, she pulled down my zipper and reached, with a sly, comic bravado, within.
My clothes windmilled away, and hers flew off over her head. We toppled into my narrow bed.
Instantly, Simone Feigenbaum was zooming over, under, alongside my body, her breasts in my face, then her stomach, then her buttocks, then her face was in my face and both of us were working away like pistons until I seemed suddenly to turn inside out. Her breasts nudged my face and I got hard without ever actually getting soft and we did everything all over again, only slower. And so on, repeatedly, until my thighs ached and my penis was waving a limp white flag. I was eighteen, and a virgin besides, technically speaking.
Around six in the morning, Simone slipped out of bed and into her clothes. She asked if I had an exam that day. ‘Chemistry,’ I said. She produced a vial of pills, shook one into her hand, and dropped it on my desk. ‘Take that fifteen minutes before you go in. It’s magic. You’ll amaze yourself.’
‘Simone,’ I said, ‘why did you come here?’
‘I had to make sure I screwed you at least once before you flunked out.’ She opened the window of my ground-floor room and jumped down into the crest of snow between the dormitory and the path. I closed the window and slept for a couple of hours.
I swallowed the pill on my way to the exam. Another bright classroom, another menacing desk. During the distribution of the blue books and question sheets, I felt as if I had taken nothing stronger than a cup of coffee. I opened the blue book, read the first question, and discovered that not only did I understand it perfectly, I could visualize every detail of the relevant pages in the textbook as if they were displayed before me. At the end of the hour I had filled three blue books and completed all but one of the extra-credit questions. I floated out of the classroom and gulped a quart of cold water from the nearest fountain.
The calculus exam was twenty-two hours away. I took my guitar into the lounge and spent the afternoon playing better than I had thought possible for me. I skipped dinner and forgot about my meal job. Instead, I remembered the bridge to ‘Skylark’ and the verse to ‘But Not for Me.’ I knew who my mother had met on the sidewalk outside Biegelman’s – me, the real me, this one. After six or seven hours I said, ‘I have to memorize the math book,’ and returned to my room on a wave of applause.
When I opened the calculus textbook, I found that I had already memorized every page, including footnotes. I stretched out on the bed and observed that the cracks in the ceiling described mathematical symbols. Someone yelled, ‘Dunstan, phone call!’ I floated to the telephone and heard Simone Feigenbaum asking me how I felt. Great, I said. Had the pill done any good? I think it did, I said. Did I want another one? No, I said, but maybe you could come back to my room.
‘Are you kidding?’ Simone laughed. ‘I’m still sore. Besides, I have to study for my last exam. I’m going home afterward, but I’ll see you after the break.’
I levitated back to my room and stretched out. Sleep refused to come until seven in the morning, when absolute darkness swarmed from every wall and corner and escorted me into unconsciousness.
Someone who may or may not have been me had possessed the foresight to set my alarm clock for an hour before the exam. The same someone had shifted the clock to my desk, forcing me to get up when it yowled. Once I was on my feet, I reeled to the showers and stood beneath alternating blasts of hot and cold water, realizing that I had slept through both breakfast and lunch, in the process missing two tours of duty before the pots and pans, and would have to survive the math exam before satisfying my hunger. I rummaged through my desk drawers, discovered half a packet of M & M’s, an entire Reese’s peanut butter cup, and the greenish, salt-flecked remains clinging to the bottom of a potato chip bag. I rammed this gunk into my mouth on the way to the exam. Professor Flagship strolled from chair to chair, handing out thick wads of paper covered with mathematical formulae. He said, ‘This is a multiple-choice examination. Check off the answers and use the blue books for calculations.’ To me, he added, ‘I wish you luck, Mr Dunstan.’
I believe that I had a dim grasp of the first few problems. All the rest were in a mixture of Old Icelandic and Basque. I kept falling asleep for two-second, three-second naps. Occasionally I covered a page with doodles or scrawled the random words that limped across my mind’s surface. At the end of the hour I tossed the question sheets and blue books into the heap on the table and went off-campus to guzzle beer at a student bar until the return of unconsciousness.
My recurring dream descended once again.
All the next day I lay in bed listening to the slamming of car doors and shouts of farewell. Because I didn’t remember going to the bar, I did not understand that I had a monstrous hangover. How could I be hungover? I almost never drank alcohol. To the extent I was capable of thinking anything at all, I thought that I had come down with some spectacular new variety of flu.
Memory returned in dreamlike, photographic flashes. I watched my hand add a caricature of Professor Flagship’s face to the body of a lion with stubby wings, protruding breasts, and a bloated penis. For a second, Simone Feigenbaum revolved her lush little body above me, and I thought: Hey, that happened! I opened a blue book to a fresh page and in neat block letters wrote, THE MAIN CAUSE OF PROBLEMS IS SOLUTIONS. I remembered tossing my test papers on the professor’s desk and watching, many hours later, a stiff, disapproving bartender swiping a cloth over five inches of polished mahogany and setting down a glass crowned with foam. I realized where I was and what I had done. It was the Saturday after final exams, and the campus was filled with parents picking up their sons and daughters. Other students, myself supposedly among them, were taking the bus to the airport.
The universe in which people could pack bags and climb into their fathers’ cars seemed unbridgeably distant from mine. I huddled in bed until the window was dark and the last car had driven away.
By tradition, our instructors posted exam grades in a glass-encased bulletin board on the quad before the college mailed them out. After the break, the board would be surrounded by students looking up other people’s grades. I expected to see my English and French results on the coming Monday, history no later than Tuesday, chemistry on Tuesday or Wednesday. I had extravagant hopes for chemistry. Calculus, the one that terrified me, probably would not show up until Wednesday.
The Grants expected me to come into O’Hare on Sunday afternoon. I was to call them Saturday to confirm, and my ticket was already waiting at the airport. When I felt capable of rational speech, I put in a collect call to Naperville and spoke an escalating series of whoppers about an invitation to join a friend in Barbados, and if they didn’t mind … My friend’s sister had backed out, so I’d be taking her place, the tickets were already paid for, and the family didn’t mind because I’d bunk with my friend and save them the price of a room …
The Grants said they’d be sorry not to see me, but spring vacation wasn’t far away. Phil asked if my friend might happen to be of the female variety. I said, no, he was Clark Darkmund, the name of a cherubic, porn-obsessed Minnesotan who had been rotated into the single next to mine after disagreeing about the merits of the philosophy expressed in Mein Kampf with his former roommate, Steven Glucksman of Great Neck, Long Island. Yes, I said, Clark was an interesting character. Great conversationalist, too.
‘How did the finals go?’ Phil asked.
‘We’ll see.’
‘I know my Ned,’ Phil told me. ‘You’re going to surprise yourself.’
After dinner in a student bar, I walked back to the campus. When I turned onto the path to my dorm, a German exchange student named Horst who looked like an Esquire model hastened up out of nowhere and appeared beside me. Had he been cherubic, Horst would have resembled Clark Darkmund, but there was nothing cherubic about him. He smiled at me. ‘Here we are again, alone in this desolate place. Now that you are sober, let us go to my room and undress each other very, very slowly.’
His proposition deepened my gloom, and my response surprised me even more than it did Horst. ‘I have a knife in my pocket,’ I said. ‘Unless you disappear right away, your guts will freeze before you know you’re cut.’
‘Ned.’ He looked stricken. ‘Didn’t we have an understanding?’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll count to three. Here goes. One.’
He summoned a charming smile. ‘That object in your trousers is undoubtedly far more magnificent than a knife.’
‘Two.’
‘You do not remember our conversation of last night?’
I shoved my hand into my pocket and closed it around the remnant of a roll of Life Savers.
Horst slid into the darkness with a regretful moue.
The next morning, transparent sunlight streamed down from a sky of clear, hard azure. The crisp shadows of leafless poplars stretched out across the bright snow.
Accompanied by my own crisp shadow, I walked into Middlemount and wandered around, sipping at a container of coffee and biting into an apple danish. Church bells announced the beginnings or endings of services, I didn’t know which. I inspected shop windows and otherwise goofed off. The church bells broke again into speech. Through down-sluicing light, I walked back to the college and at a crucial junction experimentally turned left instead of right and soon found myself at the edge of what appeared to be an extensive forest. Weather-beaten letters on a wooden sign nailed to the trunk of an oak read JONES’S WOODS.
At the time, all I understood was that if I walked into the woods I would feel better, so I left the road and walked into the woods.
I felt better, instantly. I seemed to be magically at home, or if not precisely at home at least in the right place. Across crunching snow packed so hard it scarcely registered my footprints, I wound through trees until I reached a ring of maples and sat down in the center of their circle, more at peace with myself than I had been since my arrival in Vermont. My anxieties dwindled, and my life was going to be all right. If I had to leave college, that was all right, too. I could always wait on tables at Inside the Outside. I could marry Simone Feigenbaum and be a kept man. Squirrels with fat winter coats raced down the trunks of oak trees and skidded across glassy snow. Eventually the light began to die, and the trees crowded closer together. I stood up and walked out.
Monday morning I went into town and bought a long salami, a square of cheddar cheese, a jar of peanut butter, a loaf of bread, a bag of Cape Cod potato chips and two smaller bags of peanut M & M’s, a quart of milk, and a six-pack of Coca-Cola. Back in my room, I wrapped slices of salami and cheese in bread and washed down spoonfuls of peanut butter with Coke. Then I put on my coat and hurried to the quad to find three of my grades posted on the board. In English, I got a B+ on the exam and a B+ for the semester; in French, B and B, disappointing but not entirely unexpected. History, in which I thought I had done well, was a disaster. My C on the exam lowered my semester grade to B–. One of the conditions of my scholarship was that I had to maintain a certain average, and I’d been counting on a B in history to balance Ds or even a potential failure in my other two courses.
I stepped back from the bulletin board and noticed something move off to my left. Horst was watching me from beside a pillar at the top of the library steps. His attitude, of an almost regal patience, suggested that he had been there for some time. He drew a gloved hand from the pocket of his duffel coat and gave a slow, ironic wave. I lowered my head and took the nearest path in the opposite direction, on my way back to the right place.
Once I had entered the clearing, worries about examinations and grade-point averages floated off into the transparent air. For a disembodied time, I became a recording eye. Squirrels repeated their comic turns. A fox stepped out between the maples, froze, and rewound itself as if on film. When the air began to darken, I reluctantly got to my feet.
Tuesday morning, I cowered starving in bed until 11:00 A.M., got up to gulp milk from the carton and gnaw at cheese and bread, climbed back in bed for another hour of deep-breathing exercises, and finally managed to propel myself into the shower. There was the slightest possibility that our chemistry grades might be announced that afternoon. Most professors posted their grades before 3:00 P.M., and shortly before that hour I hurried into the quad and inspected the board. My section’s chemistry results had not been posted. I rammed junk food into my pockets and on the way to my sanctuary went into the brick cubicle of the dormitory post office to check my mailbox.
Wedged like a letter bomb behind the glass door of my box was an unstamped, cream-colored envelope addressed to ‘Mr Ned Dunstar.’ It bore the return address of the dean of student affairs.
Dear Mr Dunstar,
I regret the necessity of informing you of a troubling matter recently brought to my attention by Mr Roman Polk, the Manager of Food Service Personnel at Middlemount College, in which capacity Mr Polk supervises our full-time kitchen staff and those members of the student body for whom Food Services Placements have been awarded in accordance with the conditions of their Middlemount Student Support Scholarships.
Mr Polk informs me that you have failed to meet seven out of ten of your last Food Service Placement appointments, furthermore that you were absent on sick leave upon nine previous occasions. This is a matter of concern to us all.
We will meet in my office at 7:30 A.M. on the first academic day of the coming term, January 20, for a discussion of Mr Polk’s charges. You remain a valued member of the Middlemount community, and if for some reason Food Services was an inappropriate placement, another might be found. In the meantime, I wish you success in your examinations.
Sincerely yours,
Clive Macanudo
Dean of Student Affairs
When I emerged from the little cell block housing our mailboxes, who stood in the cold athwart the cement path, resplendent in a long, forest-green loden coat, fresh comb tracks dividing his thick hair? Horst might as well have been wearing a Tyrolean hat with a feather jutting from the band. He glanced at the letter protruding from my coat pocket. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Stop following me, you creep.’ I tried to walk around him.
‘Please, forget about the other night.’ Horst moved in front of me. ‘I made a silly mistake and misinterpreted our brief conversation of the day before.’
Evidently I had spoken to him in the student bar that Friday and forgotten about it later. That was fine with me. I had succeeded in forgetting most of Friday’s events as they were happening, and I certainly did not want to remember anything I might have said to Horst. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘But if you don’t stop following me, I’m still going to cut you.’
‘Please, Ned, really!’ He stepped back and raised his gloved hands in surrender. ‘Only, you do not look well. I ask as a friend, are you all right? Is anything wrong?’
‘Here we go,’ I said. ‘Count of three, remember? One.’
‘Ned, please, you don’t own a knife. In fact, you are about as dangerous as a bunny rabbit.’ Smiling, he lowered his hands. ‘Let me buy you a cup of coffee. You could tell your problems to me, after which I will explain how to fix them, after which I will bore you with mine, after which we will drink a beer and decide our problems are not so serious after all.’
‘After which we will go back to your room and fix your boring problems by taking off our clothes.’
‘I’m not talking about that,’ Horst said. ‘Honestly. I am simply offering to be of help.’
‘Then simply get out of my way.’ I walked straight toward him, and he got out of my way.
Later that afternoon, I sat frozen at the base of a giant oak and attended to the deep, nearly inaudible sound, as of powerful machinery at work, filtering up through the snowpack. Snatches of high-pitched music resounded either from the air itself or from the movement of the air through the branches. The music-laden air filled with grains of darkness, the grains coalesced, and the darkness blotted out the light.
Wednesday morning, I saw my guitar case propped beside the door. The sight immediately suggested the inspiration of adding to the music of Jones’s Woods. I jumped out of bed.
Having breakfasted on sour milk and Cape Cod potato chips, I edged into the quad, keeping a weather eye out for Horst. He did not show himself. Neither did my chemistry results, although Professor Medley’s conclusions had been posted on the board. While the names of everyone else in my section were followed by letters indicating their grades, after ‘Dunstan, Ned’ appeared only the nongrade ‘Inc,’ abbreviation-speak for ‘Incomplete.’ I stumbled back to my room and rammed the day’s nourishment into my coat pockets, remembering as I did so the summons from On High. Once again I entered the glum post office and found an official envelope pressed against the glass window of my box. Clive Macanudo: The Sequel. This time, he spelled my name right.
Dear Mr Dunstan,
I apologize for the secretarial error which resulted in the misspelling of your name throughout my letter of yesterday.
This morning, Professor Arnold Medley of our Chemistry Department spoke to me concerning your performance in his Chemistry I course. Professor Medley greeted your results on his final examination with a great deal of surprise. As you submitted the only perfect examination of the Professor’s long experience and went on to solve several extra-credit questions, your numerical grade on the examination was 127 out of 100, or A++.
Professor Medley is of the opinion that no student with grades consistently at or below the C level could have so greatly improved his grasp of the material as to earn an A++ on the final examination without unlawful assistance. I spoke on your behalf. Professor Medley agreed that at no time had he observed you cheating in any way and could offer no proof that you had not earned your result honestly. However, he found the result so anomalous as to justify his suspicions.
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