We Others

by Steven Millhauser

  MATTHEW DENNIS. Matthew Dennis, twenty-five years old, a reporter for the Daily Observer who had been assigned to cover the attacks after Charles Kraus had phoned the police, swung out of his seat as the train pulled into the station. He had spent the afternoon in Manhattan and was returning at the height of rush hour. It was all his boss’s idea: ride the train into the city with the morning crowd, listen to the talk, get a feeling for the mood. Ride the train back, keep your ears open, give us the word on the train, the word out in the lot. Circulation was way up, everyone was following the story. Matthew had been against the whole scheme. Better to make the rounds of the neighborhoods, interview upper-management types on Sascatuck Hill, talk to the guys in the gas station next to Sal’s Pizza, but who was he to turn down a free trip to the city, and besides, he’d had some good conversations down and back and had typed up most of them on his laptop. Everybody had a theory: the man would next strike at midnight, the man was an ex-cop, the man was seeking attention for a reality show. In Matthew’s view the attacker was following a pattern, but one that was difficult to pin down. He’d begun with four men, then turned to women; he’d begun in the station parking lot, then changed to a parking lot in town, to a residential street, to a living room at night. It appeared that what he liked to do was raise an expectation and suddenly swerve away—he liked taking the town by surprise. Matthew walked along the platform, exchanging a few words with Charlie Kraus. Then he stood by the steps for a while, looking down at the lot: the lights were on, though the sky was still dusk-blue. People walked in careful groups, looking around, making sure. A man came up to him and asked for a light. Matthew had stopped smoking a year ago. The man was in his mid-thirties, sharp-featured, a solid build; except for the zippered jacket, he could have been the stranger. A woman laughed: a high, nervous laugh, like a laugh rehearsed for a play. “My husband picks me up,” he heard someone say. “I don’t park here anymore.” Matthew walked down the steps. In the morning he’d first parked near the station, then changed his mind and chosen a spot farther away. He needed to walk with the crowd, listen to what people were saying, study their faces. His job on the paper was strictly temporary, until something better came along, or until he could get going on a book, but he liked it well enough, it might lead to something, you never could tell. He turned quickly when he heard what sounded like a half-stifled cry. It was only a girl who had stumbled in her heels and was clinging to her boyfriend’s arm. Everyone was thinking about the stranger, looking around. Matthew had his own theory, which he sometimes believed: that everyone had a secret, a shameful thing they had done, and the reason they feared the stranger was that he made them remember that thing. He himself, for example, had done some things in college he’d rather forget. He stepped up to his car, bent over to glance through the window—one of his ideas was that the stranger concealed himself in parked cars, which he knew how to open—and placed his key in the door. He heard a step, a single crunch of gravel, and turned with a feeling of excitement and intense curiosity. The man in the trench coat had already raised a hand, and as the palm cracked against his cheek with a force that brought tears to his eyes, Matthew was aware of the look of stern anger in the stranger’s eyes, as if he were delivering a judgment.

  HIGHLY INTELLIGENT. We read about that judgment in next morning’s Daily Observer, where Matthew Dennis recounted in detail his simulated commute, the overheard conversations, his thoughts on the station platform, his observations of crowd behavior, his walk to the car, the details of the attack. He did more than report the incident: he said that the stranger’s return to the station parking lot was evidence of a highly intelligent plan. The attacker had led us to believe that he was intent on entering our homes, on striking our most defenseless citizens, on violating our deepest privacies. As we prepared for the next attack, as our police force and our watch committees gave their full attention to our streets and houses, he returned boldly to the original scene, which he had seemed to abandon. Not only, by this maneuver, had he eluded detection; he had also made us rethink the meaning of the attacks. Far from spreading random terror, the Slapper was making a point: his target was not particular people, but the town itself. In the attacker’s mind, our town was represented largely, but not entirely, by commuters; hence four out of seven incidents had taken place in the station parking lot. Had he wished to initiate a reign of random terror, he would have spread his attacks far more widely. Moreover, the seven victims were less different than one might suppose at first glance. Although it was impossible to condone the attacks on Sharon Hands and Valerie Kozlowski, it was important to remember that Sharon Hands, the daughter of a corporate lawyer, attended a well-funded and highly regarded public high school, a symbol of membership in the community, while Valerie Kozlowski wasn’t a minimum-wage worker with no health insurance and no benefits but the co-owner of a small business. He himself, Matthew Dennis, was a reporter for the local paper, which meant that he was part of the way the town presented itself to itself. The victim who seemed to fit in least was Ray Sorensen, but that was precisely the point: Sorensen was all the others who lived in our flourishing town, all those who occupied the lower ranks of the social scale and sometimes had to work a second job in order to buy groceries and pay the bills. It was the purpose of the attacks, Matthew Dennis said, to punish all those who were guilty, not just those at the top of the heap, and what the victims were guilty of was living in our town. The long article ended with the hope that we would think less about our safety and more about the reasons why we might be guilty for living in a town such as ours. He himself harbored no resentment and vowed to become a better person.

  NOT GUILTY. Although the details of the attack on Matthew Dennis drew our fascinated attention, our reading of the article resulted, for the most part, in impatience and resentment. Matthew Dennis, we felt, had a twisted sympathy for his attacker; we distrusted his analysis of the man’s motives and, in rereading the article, we began to distrust certain details of the attack itself. Most of us would not have felt “intense curiosity” at the sight of an angry man in a parking lot at night, raising his hand to strike us in the face. We were baffled, we were exasperated, by Matthew Dennis’s lack of outrage. The same absence of anger was all too evident in his analysis, which seemed less sympathetic to us than to the man who had attacked our neighbors, disrupted our peace, and frightened our children. The next morning, angry letters appeared in the Daily Observer, denouncing Matthew Dennis and questioning the judgment of the editors in running the story. What particularly galled us was the suggestion that all of us might be guilty and deserving of punishment. After all, we were not members of some revolutionary gang who had raided an enemy town and committed rape and murder, we were not passive citizens turning our heads away as smoke rose from the concentration camp chimneys. No, we were peaceful, law-abiding inhabitants of a suburban town, trying to raise our kids in a difficult world, while keeping our lawns mowed and our roof gutters free of leaves. The man was a criminal and needed to be put away. The next morning, an editorial acknowledged the storm of protest and stated that the opinions of the article were not necessarily those of the Daily Observer. The more we thought about it, the more offended we were by Matthew Dennis’s report, so that we almost forgot, in our indignation, that the stranger had struck another blow.

  WAITING. Again we waited, like people looking up at the sky for a storm. This time we sensed a difference. Now there was anger in our town—you could feel it like a wind. We were angry at the presence of danger in our streets, angry at the police department, angry at being put on the defensive by reporters whose job it was to give us the facts and keep their cracked ideas to themselves. You could feel a tension in public places, an uneasiness at the dinner table. On the streetcorner across from the post office in the center of town, a dozen people stood with signs that read KEEP OUR STREETS SAFE and MORE POLICE. A bearded man with a ponytail held a sign printed in large red letters: THE JUDGMENT IS COMING. Tempers were short. In the library p
arking lot, a fight broke out when one car backed into another. We went to bed early and lay there listening. Waking in the dark, we pushed aside the blinds and looked out our bedroom windows at houses glowing with light: the front porch lights, the living room lights, floodlights over garage doors, lanterns on lawns—as if our town were having a party all through the night.

  DIVINE PUNISHMENT. One of the more bizarre developments of the lull was the emergence of certain shrill, fanatical voices, which saw the stranger as a messenger of the divine will. A letter in the opinions section of the Daily Observer, signed Beverly Olshan, stated that our town was being punished for its sins. We became aware of small groups, which perhaps had always been there, with names like Daughters of Jericho and Prophets of the Heavenly Host; members of the latter proclaimed that the stranger had been sent by the Lord to warn us of his wrath unless we mended our ways. Even those of us who dismissed such ideas as ignorant or childish could not escape the thought that the stranger was punishing us, like an angry father, for something we had done, or for something we had failed to do, or for something else, which we ought to have known but did not.

  THE PACKAGE. Seven days after the attack on Matthew Dennis, a package addressed to the police department was deposited on the top step of the post office at some time between midnight and 5:00 a.m. At 5:00 a.m. a mail carrier starting his shift noticed it from his truck. Later that morning, post office officials met for a brief consultation and decided to summon the police. Rumors about the incident first appeared on Matthew Dennis’s new website, but we had to wait for the morning paper before we could read a definitive report. The package, wrapped in brown paper, bore no return address. The police determined that the suspicious-looking parcel posed no danger. Back at the department they carefully removed the brown paper and found a plain cardboard box, tied with white string. In the box lay a tan trench coat, neatly folded. No note had been enclosed. There was little doubt, though no proof, that it was the coat of the stranger. Apparel experts had been called in, lab tests were being conducted, a thorough investigation was under way. Meanwhile we wondered what the stranger wanted us to think. Was he announcing that his attacks had come to an end, or was he warning us that we should expect a new attack in a different disguise? For a week, for two weeks, we led anxious lives, alert to the minutest signs. Toward the end of the third week, as leaves turned yellow and red and the sun shone from a cold blue sky, we began to have the sense of a burden slowly lifting.

  DISSATISFACTION. Although we could feel ourselves moving toward the normal course of our lives, with all the familiar pleasures and worries, at the same time we couldn’t escape a sense of incompletion. The proper ending, we felt, should have been the capture of the stranger, who would have given us the explanation we desperately needed to hear. We would have listened carefully, nodded our heads thoughtfully, and punished him to the full extent of the law. Then we would have forgotten him. Instead we’d been left with an improper ending, an ending heavy with uncertainties, which was to say, no ending at all. The police investigation had come to nothing. We asked ourselves whether the stranger had left because he found it impossible to continue his attacks without serious risk of being caught, or whether he’d left because he had completed a careful plan to attack seven people. Even if we had known the reason for his departure, we still wouldn’t have known why he had come in the first place. What had he wanted from us? What had we done? In certain respects, the end of the attacks was more disturbing than the attacks themselves, since the attacks held a continual promise of capture and revelation, whereas the end of the attacks was also an end of the hope that had always accompanied them. In this sense, the end of the attacks was simply another way of continuing them—a way that could not be stopped.

  THE SEVEN WHO WERE SLAPPED. It was at this time, when we were returning uneasily to our former sense of things, that meetings began to spring up all over town, for the purpose of discussing and analyzing recent events. There were large public meetings at the town hall and in the auditorium of one of our two high schools, gatherings at businessmen’s associations and fraternal organizations, at the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, at the Ethical Culture Society and the Jewish Community Center, at the First Congregational Church and the Church of the Immaculate Conception, to say nothing of private get-togethers in living rooms, dens, and finished basements. Often, at these meetings, one of the seven who were slapped appeared as a special guest, with the exception of Walter Lasher, who never accepted such invitations or even acknowledged them. The guest spoke for fifteen or twenty minutes and then answered questions from the audience. What did it feel like when the stranger appeared? How much did the slap hurt? Did you fear he might kill you? What was he trying to prove? Even Valerie Kozlowski, once she overcame her reticence, took to the podium with surprising vigor. The most popular speakers proved to be Sharon Hands, whose long blond hair came sweeping down over her shoulders and lay against silky blouses of cerise, emerald, and brilliant white, and the controversial Matthew Dennis, who wore an old sport coat, a black shirt open at the neck, jeans without a belt, and white running shoes, and who liked to walk back and forth in front of us, punctuating his remarks with slashing movements of his hands and turning suddenly to face the audience. Now and then a speaker appeared even at one of the fringe groups, such as Prophets of the Heavenly Host, that had begun to attract a wider membership and now held public meetings in rented halls. As we sat in the audience and watched a speaker, we sometimes experienced an odd kind of envy, as if, by not being slapped, we had failed to be part of a profound moment, had somehow, by our caution, evaded a call to adventure. At the same time we understood that we were already forgetting the precise feel of those troubled days, which were slipping away into history and taking on the warm, soft colors of a sentimental rural painting (“Red Barn and Clouds,” “Morning Sleigh Ride”) suitable for the walls of banks, hospital waiting rooms, and the lobbies of office buildings.

  BLOSSOMING. One morning at the station parking lot, as if by secret agreement, the trench coats returned. Tan, beige, and taupe, they emerged from car after car, like pale flowers blossoming in the early morning light. Richard Emerick had put on his trench coat in the front hall, but he had paused, thought hard, and then removed it, choosing instead the black wool coat with lambskin-trim collar that he usually saved for later in the year. As he stepped from his car in the parking lot he immediately saw his mistake. In his fingers he could feel the pressure of the belt-ends as he looped them over in front. The forecast for tomorrow was light rain in the early morning. He would be ready for it.

  SUCCESS AND FAILURE. As the slaps began to recede, as even their echo in our minds was becoming fainter and fainter, we wondered whether we had emerged successfully from our ordeal. To call it an ordeal was of course something of an exaggeration. After all, we hadn’t been murdered. We hadn’t been raped, or beaten, or stabbed, or robbed. We had only been slapped. Even so, we had been invaded, had we not, we had felt threatened in our streets and homes, we had been violated in some definite though enigmatic way. Therefore, when the attacks appeared to be over, we felt that we had emerged from an ordeal, though we were still uncertain how we felt. Sometimes it seemed to us that the stranger with his angry eyes had known something about us that we ourselves did not know. Sometimes we wondered whether he was right about us, even though we did not know what it was that he was right about. More often we dismissed such thoughts and reproached ourselves for our failure to catch him, our failure to prevent him from repeatedly attacking us. At about this time an editorial appeared in the Daily Observer. Signed THE EDITORS, the article discussed the episode of the stranger and concluded by saying that it was over now and that we ought to “learn from it and move on.” The editors did not tell us what we might learn, unless it was that we needed a larger police force in our town, nor did they tell us in which direction we should think of moving. Therefore our sense of relief, when the attacks appeared to have ended, was al
so a sense of unrelief; our feeling of success was also a feeling of failure. Now, that is not the way things are, in our town. Here, success is success, failure failure. There is no confusion between the two. Success that is also failure is nothing at all. We don’t know how to take hold of it. And so we wonder: What have we learned from it all? We know only that something has happened in our town that can never unhappen. On a fine spring day, when all this is far behind us, we may be walking down a street, under branches of budding maples and lindens. On the porches, reflections of porch posts and tree branches show in the glass front doors, which haven’t yet been changed to screens. The thought comes: He could be standing behind that tree. Then we look more carefully at the root rippling toward the sidewalk, at the place where the bark-edge stands clear against the background of grass, street, and distant houses, and where, at any moment, a shoulder might emerge, an arm rise, a hand swing violently toward our faces, as we walk along, under the budding branches, with their yellow-green flowers against the blue sky.

  Tales of Darkness and the Unknown,

  Vol. XIV:

  The White Glove

  1

  In senior year of high school I became friends with Emily Hohn. It happened quickly: one day she was that quiet girl in English class, the next we were friends. She had passed in and out of my attention over the last year or so, and it was as if I suddenly turned my head in her direction. I liked her calmness, her unruffled sense of herself, her way of standing as if she could feel the ground under her feet. As for me, I was a floater, a cloud-man, tense, jittery, cat-wary, all nerves and bone, and I’d spent the last year so desperately in love with another girl, so whipped-up and feverish, that even my happiness had felt like unhappiness. Emily Hohn’s quietness drew me in as if it had been waiting for me all along. It wasn’t only her calmness that attracted me. That would be unfair. I liked looking at her—at her thickish brownish shortish hair shot through with lighter strands that caught the sun, her small neat hands with close-cut nails, her round wrists, one of which had a pale chicken-pox scar, her slightly lowered eyelids that made her look a little sleepy, her slow smile. She reminded me of things I liked: streetlights at night, a peaceful room. I liked her clothes—the trim fresh-smelling pastel shirts, the knee-length skirts in black or dark green wool, the cardigans worn open with the sleeves pushed halfway up her forearms, the broad leather belts, dark red or black, with big square buckles that made me think of picture frames. I liked watching her crinkle her eyebrows when she tried to figure something out. I liked the way she sometimes reached over and scratched the back of her left hand with two fingers of her right. Most of all, I liked that she didn’t stir me up—didn’t move her body a certain way. I was sick to death of all that. I wanted something I could count on. I was grateful for stillness.