Everything Solid has a Shadow

by Michael Antman

  At night, the glow from the streetlights was bleary and weak, but it still illuminated, ever so slightly, the yellow crayon marks on the opposite wall. The sunlight and streetlight wouldn’t have illuminated anything except the opposite wall’s baseboard molding, in fact, if the dollhouse had been attached to the wall in a natural way, which is to say at a right angle to the floor, creating a kind of linoleum “sidewalk” leading to the house. But instead, the dollhouse had been affixed a foot or so above the floor, so that it appeared to float on the wall. I could almost see the children kneeling on their haunches on the worn, buckled white linoleum, delightedly opening and closing those clever little shutters at a level that would have been about even with their eyes. I could see, almost, the formless patch of sunlight that must have played on their innocent eyelids and unformed cheekbones and fine messy hair, and I could feel, as they must have felt, the infinitesimal piercing draft of cold when the weather turned. What a wonderful adult to have created such a thing, when the dormer room was so small (it was clearly intended only for storage) that anyone larger than a toddler would have had to kneel in order to install that dollhouse with its shutters, or to view it as I did now.

  Kneel, or lie uncomfortably on one side, with one’s legs extending into the bedroom that the dormer room adjoined. But lying on one side would have left only one arm free to cut that tiny rectangle through the wall of the house and install those precise hinges and featherlight shutters, so kneeling had been, I assumed, the way it had been done.

  I would find out later that I was wrong.

  Regardless of method, the shutters existed, and they opened and closed. And thus it was here, in this actual house, in this dormer room at the top of this actual house, in this shadow of a dollhouse that floated above the linoleum floor of the dormer room, and in the shuttered “window” that opened up a tiny sliver of the slanted and cramped little room to the actual sunlight outside, that I discovered why MariAngela had come to me in my dream, and what had actually happened to Willa and me when we were eight years old and to little Elizabeth when she was an infant. That’s the story I want to tell—how I solved those two mysteries and, having solved them, where I went from there.

  5

  As far as the house itself is concerned, I’m just renting it for a couple of years from a family who moved to the Philippines to do some kind of Christian missionary work. There’s something pretty weird about the family, but this is not a ghost story, at least not exactly, so don’t get the idea that my house is haunted or anything along those lines. It’s a rambling old house—once upon a time, the rental agent told me, a farmhouse—with a lot of little cupboards and cubbyholes and crawl spaces, many of which I have yet to explore, and many of which are still crammed with junk from the missionary family, or from their predecessors, or, who knows, from the farmers who originally built the place. For example, I’m not exactly sure what a “harrow” is, but I think I saw the spiky points of one, along with some ancient cardboard boxes of ant killer and some soiled spades, in one of the crawl spaces in the basement, but the space was crawling with earthworms, so I never investigated further.

  I’m not home a lot, because I travel quite a bit to meet with clients and do marketing audits, and of course I fly down to Buenos Aires when I can to visit my parents. And, as I’ve noted, when I’m not working I like to play guitar and perform my music—a sort of alt-country, folk-soul hybrid leaning more to the folk side, with Michael Stipe phrasing because my lyrics are oblique and I like it that way. I perform mostly at Berto’s on their “acoustic nights” and once in a blue moon (or as MariAngela calls it, a “blue mood”) at a few other small clubs around town. I’m a pretty damn good songwriter, I think, though apparently not too many other people think so, based on my lack of success so far. Look me up in the Apple Store or Spotify, or just Google my name or something, and you’ll see what I mean: You’ll find me pretty much nowhere.

  The point I want to make is that I’m a “sensitive songwriter” and all that, but in general, I’m no more or less sensitive than any other guy. I have an incredibly pretty girlfriend in Alisa, and I treat her a little more apathetically than I should from time to time—other than, of course, being extremely careful not to get her pregnant. And I’m not touchy-feely or new-agey, and I have no particular interest in my Argentine or Italian “heritage,” since I was actually born here, and my parents didn’t return there for good until I was in college, and most important of all, I have no psychic abilities whatsoever.

  Whatever happened to me, and to MariAngela, and to my girlfriend Alisa, and to everyone else, was kind of thrust on me. Like electromagnetic waves in the atmosphere, or the ions that arrive every instant from the farthest reaches of the universe, it all just sort of floated in through an open window.

  A couple of nights after my odd encounter with MariAngela, Alisa and I went out with Alisa’s coworker at her PR agency, Frank, and his wife Diane. Alisa is twenty-nine and I’m twenty-eight, but this couple is about ten years older than us, and I think Alisa was drawn to them because she was holding them out to me as an example of what a successful marriage could look like ten years down the road. That was fine with me—I’m not one of those types of men who makes sparks on the sidewalk with his heels while his girlfriend drags him to the altar. I really want to get married and to feel as if a woman trusts me enough to spend her life with me, though with one understanding between the two of us that should be clear enough by now.

  Frank was a little bit of the professorial type, but not in a super-pompous way, and Diane, who’s a labor-law attorney, was incredibly lively. She had those midlife braces on her teeth you see on some women that make them seem touchingly hopeful about the future, and she laughed constantly, though not at all in an annoying way, as if she were proud of the braces and wanted to show them off. The braces seemed like they were in a race against time with her laugh lines, but she didn’t seem to care, and everything she said, just about, was full of happiness and good cheer, and she had a little chestnut-brown pixie cut that swished back and forth as she turned from face to face at the table, making sure that everyone was having a good time like she was. After one of our dinners, Alisa had said, “I just don’t think she’s vivacious enough,” and we laughed for a good long time about that.

  Alisa herself was a lot quieter and had some levels that weren’t open to the public, if you know what I mean. She had amazing green eyes and light blondish-brown hair that made a straight line across the middle of her forehead, and she was very tall—my height, five foot eleven. She was very, very pretty, as I mentioned, with luminous pale skin, though her jaw seemed a bit too large for her face, and that alone kept her from being genuinely beautiful. When she was upset, which was often enough, she’d jut it out and lock it into position like a lantern fish, and at those times, she became ugly and fearsome to me, and I had trouble even looking at her.

  There was something about all of these factors—her height, her temper, the fact that she was a year older than me, and the fact that she had an enigmatic quality where, even after nearly three years of dating, I wasn’t sure I entirely knew her—that made me a little afraid of her, if I can be honest. She’d even played volleyball in college for a couple of years, at Coronado State in San Diego, and was a better athlete than me, and probably almost as strong as I was, which isn’t a big deal, I guess, except my Latin heritage made it one. On top of everything else, it seemed very important to her to be smarter than me, and part of that meant rolling her eyes, a little bit, at some of the songs I wrote. She well understood the words “jejune” and “sophomoric” and “callow,” and she wasn’t hesitant to use them. I was afraid, at those times, to remind her that I was the one who’d taught her what those words meant to begin with.

  But none of this really strikes at the heart of it. Even if Alisa had been perfect in every way, I still believe I would have felt unhappy all of the time, as I did with all of my gi
rlfriends and my dwindling band of other acquaintances. There was a continual lump in my chest and stomach that corresponded with the holes in the chests and stomachs of my father’s epicene odalisques. I didn’t know what this lump was for the longest time, or how it related to the mystery of Elizabeth—because I didn’t understand for the longest time that there was a mystery. So I just sort of navigated through my days with Alisa, attentive only to her insults and insensible to all of the rest of her.

  Did she know about what had happened with Elizabeth? Sure. Did she hold it against me? Not at all. If anything, she was very careful to reassure me that it was the sort of careless thing that any little boy could have done, but there was always the implication, somehow, that the careless little boy in question was, in its present-day incarnation, me.

  But I was always more relaxed with her when we went out with Frank and Diane because both of us respected them, and Alisa seemed to be impressed that Frank, in particular, was impressed by me. So I generally looked forward to our double dates. Maybe that meant there was something wrong in our relationship that I needed a buffer like Frank and Diane, but obviously so did Alisa, so there you go.

  This night, we went to see a movie that was squirming and jumping all over with glittery CGI effects like a dead dog with maggots and fleas, and we were all pretty disgusted by how bad it was, but then we went to a steak house and had a few drinks, and I decided to tell them all the story about my prophetic dream. I figured it’d be at least a little more interesting to talk about than the movie.

  Frank corrected me right away. “It wasn’t prophetic. You told me she was already diagnosed when you had the dream. I think it was more of a ‘clairvoyant’ dream.”

  I said, “Claire who?” Alisa looked at me and snorted. She didn’t especially like it when I played the fool, and that, in turn, made me feel foolish. The whole point of deliberately playing the fool was the humor that was inherent in the ironic contrast with one’s actual intelligence, but it sometimes seemed as if Alisa missed the “intelligence” aspect of it entirely, and focused only on the “fool” part. And yet if I had indicated to Frank that I knew precisely what “clairvoyant” meant—and of course I did—that would have irritated Alisa even more.

  “Clairvoyant,” Frank said. “She was somehow communicating with you telepathically. I think we all have those skills but they’re vestigial”—Alisa shot me a look in case I was planning to pretend I didn’t know what that word meant either—“and it’s only in times of high and low emotion that the connection gets made.”

  Alisa said, as if she were prompting the explanation along for my benefit rather than really needing to know, “What do you mean by high and low emotion?”

  “Well, I’m just a PR guy, but I just think that when some insensitive, blockhead ass like your boyfriend”—I smiled at this; I’d heard worse, and I knew that Frank’s comment was more of a statement of disapproval about Alisa’s implied judgment of me than it was actually about me—“is sleeping, it’s about the only time our defenses are completely down and relaxed, and we return to this animal state where our vestigial senses are awake. No bills, no work, no crappy movies, no relationship issues to get in the way and block the transmissions.

  “But at the same time, your friend MaryAnn or whatever you said her name was, she’s in a state of extremely high emotion because she’s just been diagnosed with a deadly disease, so it’s like water being poured from a full vessel into an empty one, if you will. You know, ‘seeking its own level.’ That’s how she delivered her message to you, even though she wasn’t aware that she was doing it.”

  I thought to myself, If you will. That was exactly the kind of thing Frank would say, because it was the kind of thing that professors would say. He was a big, rangy guy with a high forehead, muscular biceps and forearms, and a kind of soft, distant, “wise” look in his eyes that made him look like an especially vigorous emissary from the future. But I liked him; he respected me.

  “And it doesn’t only happen when you’re dreaming. Let me give you an example. This was years ago; I’m coming down the down escalator at Midway from some flight to who-knows-where, and there’s this flight attendant going up the up escalator, and just at the moment she passes me, in other words rises above me, she happens to turn around and glance down at me, and I saw this look on her face.” He paused and closed his eyes for a moment. “She was young and slender and a lot better looking than most flight attendants these days, but I noticed that she had kind of a stiff, old-fashioned hairstyle and also a stiff posture, and her face, oh, man, that face, it was haughty, and imperious, and disappointed, and pretentious, and there were practically tears in her eyes. And it was like she was instantaneously communicating to me that she found men insufferable and her family uncultured and her fellow stewardesses stupid and cowlike and that I was someone, or maybe I was the only one, who could understand her and make her happy.”

  Diane snorted. “You knew all this from one glance she gave you?”

  “Yeah, and more. It was because she was really upset about something at that very moment, probably a man who’d yet again let her down, and I was just diddling around on the escalator waiting to get down to baggage claim and pick up my bags and not thinking about anything in particular. So when it hit me, it hit me like an electric shock, and it wasn’t only the things I told you either, it was like I instantaneously knew how she felt when she was having sex, and how she hated her mother, and how she couldn’t find anyone to talk with about good books, and everything, and then by the time I looked up again, she’d hit the top of the escalator and was gone.”

  “Poor Frankie! The love of your life!” The way Diane said this, it was a little hard to interpret. She wasn’t sarcastic or dismissive or angry, and indeed her tone was rather light, but there was a strained quality to it, too, which Alisa and I acknowledged to each other with a quick glance.

  In any event, Alisa jumped in before Frank could answer. “Okay, I know what you’re saying about high emotion and low emotion. It reminds me of this thing we learned in college English about ‘negative capability,’ where if you’re a true poet, you can sort of let your mind go slack and become open to things you otherwise wouldn’t have ever noticed. But I don’t know what you mean about this ‘vestigial senses’ business. Just, like, ESP?”

  “Not necessarily. I mean, I don’t even believe in ESP, and I know Charlie doesn’t either. It’s all a load of bullshit and wishful thinking. But there’s something else.” He picked up his steak knife and said, “Okay, Alisa, since you were foolish enough to ask, I’m going to play a little game with you. Lean forward.”

  Obediently, without even asking why, Alisa did as she was told. I felt a pang about this, because if I picked up a knife in front of Alisa and tried to play whatever game it was Frank was about to play, she would have given me hell and implied I wanted to kill her or something.

  Frank also leaned forward and brought the tip of the steak knife close to Alisa’s eyes. Diane said “Whoa,” and grabbed at Frank’s wrist, but he just pushed her away with his other hand.

  “Don’t worry, there’s relatively little eye gouging involved in this experiment.” Then, in a softer voice that wasn’t directed to anyone else at the table, he said, “Trust me, Alisa, I haven’t stabbed anyone in a long time.”

  He took a deep breath and brought the knife back in front of Alisa’s eyes. “Now close your eyes,” he said. Again, although this time with a nervous laugh, Alisa did as she was told.

  “Now, Diane and Charlie, watch carefully, but don’t say anything.” Now he very slowly brought the tip of the knife down to the bridge of Alisa’s nose and held it there, less than a millimeter away from her skin. “Alisa? Okay. Keep your eyes closed and concentrate. Tell me what you’re feeling right now.”

  Alisa thought for a moment and said, “Nothing.” Then she said, “Oh, my God,” and opened her eyes very sudden
ly. “It was bristling! It was like you were holding a magnet to my face and all the tiny hairs on my face were made out of iron filings or something and they were all moving! God, it felt creepy. Don’t ever do that again!” And she mock-threatened Frank with a fork in her right hand, but with her left hand she had picked up her own steak knife and waved it in my direction.

  It was my turn. I closed my eyes and Alisa carefully brought the knife to the bridge of my nose, and for a long time I felt nothing, and I forgot about my clairvoyant dream and reminded myself that I was an insensitive blockhead after all, but then I felt it—an infinitesimal cringing sensation on the skin between my eyes, a faint tingling at the bridge of my nose and, most of all, a sense that the tiny hairs on my face were erect, alert, and bristling. I thought of wolves and coyotes and badgers, and of a terrified opossum I’d once encountered standing stock-still behind my house at midnight, and of housecats puffed up in fear.

  “So,” Frank said, as Alisa put down her knife—though not without first mock stabbing me just for the hell of it—“that’s a vestigial sense. Not a big deal. We all have ’em; we just almost never use ’em. Another one is when you stand at the edge of a cliff and peer over and you get a tingling or aching sensation in your groin. Some people claim they don’t know what I’m talking about, but that’s because they’re not paying attention to themselves.”

  By this time, our food had arrived—veal Oscar for me, a steak salad for Diane, cliff-like slabs of pork chops for Frank, and a delicate little rack of lamb for Alisa that I couldn’t bear to look at—and suddenly Diane spoke up for what seemed to be the first time in hours, even though we hadn’t been at the restaurant for more than forty minutes in all. She was murmuring in a low voice, and it sounded so unlike her usual lively self that we all sort of sat up and paid attention.