by John Langan
I wondered about contacting some of the other people who'd stayed in the house—the students who'd rented it in the sixties—but the farthest I got was an awkward call to Dr. Sullivan. I couldn't figure out how to find out what I wanted to know. I mean, you can't just come out and ask someone if they had a supernatural experience, can you? You could, but they'd think you were some kind of nut. I spent about ten minutes asking if she or anyone else in her family had noticed anything strange while they were in the house, anything unusual, anything out of the ordinary. She kept saying no, no, nothing in the slightest, until she lost her patience and demanded to know what was going on. Radon gas, I said. It was the first thing that came to mind. We haven't been feeling well lately, I said, and we're concerned it might be due to radon. And wouldn't it be just my luck that she should know something about radon poisoning? I had to invent a whole history of additional, phony symptoms for Roger and me. By the end of our conversation, she was urging both of us to have full check-ups. I didn't like lying to her, but at least I was able to rule out radon as the cause for the Weirdness.
While I was busy with all this—and believe me, no Ph.D. student writing her dissertation worked this hard; for about two weeks, this was all I did, all day—while I was up to my elbows in the facts of Thomas Belvedere's life and studies of Abstract Expressionism, Roger was pursuing other interests. For the first week, he'd taken the lead in researching the house, but once I became involved in a serious way, he withdrew, gradually, then all at once. I didn't notice. That's not true. I noticed; I didn't attach any significance to it. He tended to run through things much more quickly than I did. Obviously, he'd taken his researches as far as he could. He had his own projects, which I assumed he'd returned to. If I hadn't been so busy with studies of the house as a structural manifestation of the feminine archetype, I probably would have paid more attention to the oversized envelopes that had started arriving in the mail for him, or I would have ventured up to the third floor to ask him what he was doing in his office for hours and hours and hours.
And if I'm being honest, more than my work kept me surrounded by the library's tall bookcases. Ever since the Mutual Weirdness, the house had felt—contingent. It was as if the invisible house, the one that hovered at the edges of my senses, had drawn closer. Not a lot closer, but sufficient to make the walls around me, the floor beneath, seem more tenuous. I would sit on the library's couch, poring over Belvedere's biography, already festooned with post-it notes in half a dozen colors, for the fiftieth time, trying to squeeze additional meaning out of details long since wrung dry, and for all my concentration—almost because of it—I would feel the house—I want to say shimmering, as if it were an enormous soap-bubble. I would be positive that, were I to put my feet on the floor, the entire house would burst, revealing—I wasn't sure what. Maybe nothing. You know how it is when you're alone. The strangest ideas seize hold of you and refuse to let go. So I left Roger to his own devices, which was a mistake.
Because it wasn't only that he was spending more and more of each day in his office—that happened when he was absorbed in an article or book—and who was I to talk about that, spending fourteen pretty-much-uninterrupted hours in the second floor library, all my material on Belvedere spread out on the floor around the computer desk. No, it was that, when I saw Roger, when he brought lunch or dinner to me, which he did most days, or if he waited for me to come to bed, which he did less and less, he seemed more stressed—more strained—than ever. His smiles were painted on. He'd jump if I tried to put my arms around him from behind. If I placed my hand on his, or his arm—you know, one of those gestures you make to your spouse—it was like touching a high voltage wire. You could practically smell the ozone. In the days after the Mutual Weirdness, I chalked up the change to that experience. I hadn't been affected that way, true, but I wasn't as much a dyed-in-the-wool rationalist as Roger, and anyway, here I was burying myself in all these books, so maybe I'd been more affected than I realized.
With each day that went by, however, Roger seemed worse. On a couple of occasions, I asked him flat-out what was wrong, only to have him shake his head and retreat out of the library. On a couple more—once in the library and once in the kitchen—he started to say something to me, only to break off after barely a sentence. During that second week, when I was in the thick of my research, I kept promising myself that I was going to do something about this—shift in Roger. I wasn't going to sit on my hands the way I had while he'd crashed and burned at school. I just needed to finish this article. Maybe I should have left, escaped, instead of sequestering myself each day in the very heart of peril. I'd like to say it was because I didn't want to abandon Roger, which isn't untrue. I knew he'd never agree to move from the house, no matter how unhappy being there was making him. But strange as it sounds, leaving didn't seem like an option to me, either. I'm not sure I can explain it, but it was like, the very same feeling that should have sent me screaming out the front door kept me exactly where I was.
That second week, there was one moment. I was curled up on the couch, plodding through this essay by Derrida that had sounded relevant when I'd read about it in another article, but had turned into the written equivalent of trying to walk down a path that's completely overgrown. No, it wasn't about Belvedere. It was on Antonin Artaud. I was tangled in a typical sentence, rereading it over and over in an attempt to force some meaning from it—and frustrated to the point of wanting to toss the pages aside and be done with them. It didn't help that it was late, about eleven, and I'd been at this nonstop since seven a.m. I had tried to take notes, but my writing had gone from sentences to words to question marks. As I was adding another question mark to the list, I noticed a figure standing in the door. I thought it was Roger, and my heart gave a little leap at the possibility that he had come to talk to me at last.
You guessed it: when I looked up, the doorway was empty. I wasn't especially freaked out. I thought I'd seen Roger and I hadn't, that was all. What gradually got to me, though, was wondering why, as I remembered what hadn't been there, I'd imagined Roger so much taller than he was? That, and something else—the figure in the doorway had been dark, as if it had been standing in shadow. Yes, I recalled that night in my apartment when I'd seen someone behind me. This had been briefer, and even less certain than my old kitchen at three a.m., but as I compared the experiences—and my chances of finishing Derrida decreased dramatically—they were similar enough to make me very nervous. The house was quiet. I could hear Roger pacing upstairs, even a pair of late-night walkers talking as they passed on the street. Underneath that quiet—or beside it—my sense of the house, at the border of my skin. Caught up in the silence and the skin was something else. Not a feeling, not an awareness of whatever had or hadn't been in the doorway—it was more the lack of awareness, a kind of positive lack, an active absence. It was enough to make me wish I could stay in the library for the rest of the night, instead of yielding myself to the danger of walking out the door and down the hall to the bedroom. I did not want to pass through the space that shadowy form had occupied. I delayed as long as I could, flipping through the introduction to the Derrida, consulting the index, but in the end, I went. I wasn't happy about it, but I left, flinching as I crossed the threshold. The hallway was dim. As I padded up it, I heard something, so faint as to be almost lost in the slide of my socks over the floor. I stopped, listening. Nothing. I waited, but whatever it was had stopped. I hurried to the bathroom. I hadn't heard words, had I? "Blood," "torment," "anything." No.
By the end of two weeks of research, it was pretty clear to me that the mysteries of Thomas Belvedere were going to remain unsolved. I hung on for another day, finishing a couple of articles I'd started, searching online when a new idea occurred to me, but that was as much me not wanting to have given up too soon as anything. It had been pretty clear by the end of week one that we weren't going to learn anything more than we already had. You hope, though; you hope that somewhere in the midst of all this information
are the clues that you alone will notice and assemble. The mark of a scholar, right?
In looking for those non-existent clues, however, I'd been neglecting the very obvious signs that Roger's troubles were worsening. As I was reading the final article I'd copied—it was one by Harlow, on Belvedere and this H. P. Lovecraft story, "The Dreams in the Witch House"—as I was returning stacks of books to the libraries at SUNY and Penrose, finally getting myself out of the house, Roger's behavior was sliding from bad to worse. He wasn't preparing any meals. He was ordering breakfast from one of the diners and going to pick it up, lunch and dinner from Chinese and Italian restaurants and having it delivered. Once the food arrived, he carried his portion up to his office, knocking on the library door on his way past and calling that whatever meal it was was waiting for me in the kitchen. His jogging schedule had become erratic, his walking even more so. Mostly, he left his office to use the bathroom, fetch meals, and go to bed—which he didn't do until early in the morning. He was back at his office before I was awake. One night, he either slept upstairs or worked straight through till morning. I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt—that was what I told myself—maybe he'd become obsessed with an exciting idea. What I was doing, of course, was delaying the inevitable. I was afraid of what was going to happen when I confronted Roger. I was afraid he was going to need serious psychiatric help, and I didn't have the faintest idea how to convince him to seek it out, or, if he refused, to insure he received it. Of all the possible complications I'd worried about when we got together, Roger losing his mind had not been among them, and trying to deal with it was overwhelming. How very nineteenth century. Granted, it was usually the woman who was insane and living upstairs—The Madwoman in the Attic, right? When the man was out of his mind—well, no attics for him.
When Roger showed me what he'd been doing in his office, it didn't help matters any. The day after I returned the last book on Belvedere to the library and filed my notes away for future use, Roger asked me if I would join him on the third floor. I was at the kitchen table, eating a late breakfast and leafing through the latest issue of The New Yorker. He was freshly showered—his hair was still wet—and he had on a clean pair of jeans and a blue and orange SUNY Huguenot sweatshirt. "What is it?" I asked him.
"Come up to my office and we can discuss it there," he said, and before I could ask him why we couldn't talk about it here, where I had half an omelet sitting on my plate, he walked out of the kitchen. I heard the stairs creak as he started up them.
I must have sat there for five, maybe ten minutes. I wanted to finish my breakfast, and I wasn't sure I wanted to go up to Roger's office. Tension spilled from him like heat from a sunlamp. I wasn't worried about him becoming violent or anything. I knew him well-enough to be sure that wasn't in him, and besides, I'd beaten him at arm-wrestling enough to know that, if it came down to a fight, I could kick his ass. It was—all of a sudden, that office became—whatever had been going on with Roger this past week was going to be reflected in that room, and I couldn't decide if I wanted to see that. I washed and dried my dishes, then stood looking out the kitchen windows. There was woman walking along Founders Street with her baby—she had the baby in one of those sport strollers, you know, the kind with the big wheels. She was wearing a maroon tracksuit and white sneakers; her hair was pulled back by a maroon and white headband. She was too far away for me to be able to tell for sure, but I thought she looked around my age. I couldn't see the baby. I looked down, and saw that, without realizing it, I'd put my hands over my belly. I watched the woman push the stroller past the Dutch Reformed Church, then around the bend that leads to Addie and Harlow's place. When she was out of sight, I left the kitchen and climbed the stairs.
On my way up to the third floor, along walls Roger and his students had painted pale yellow, past pictures of Ted I'd hung up the stairways, the mirrors at the top of the second floor stairs and the bottom of the third floor stairs, I was acutely aware of places where the house felt—less dense, as if, were I to smash a hammer through them, I would find, not wood and wires, pipes, but darkness, an opening into I couldn't say what. For a moment, there was almost something there—as if something were pressed against the other side of the wall, listening to me pass. I imagined Roger's face, enormous as I'd seen it that day in my apartment; I pictured those oversized features slowly bleeding onto the plaster. The vision of the house I'd first had when I miscarried seemed less psychological symbol and more . . . I wasn't sure what—diagram, maybe.
Outside the door to Roger's office, which was closed over but not shut, I paused, cleared my throat, and called, "Roger?"
"Come in," he called back.
I pushed open the door. Roger was standing a few paces in front of me, his head down, his hands clasped behind his back. He must have been holding that pose for some time, since I hadn't heard anything from the office as I'd approached it. He'd probably been that way for the last ten minutes. How theatrical, I thought, which was always true of Roger. He loved those kinds of gestures. I was so concerned with him that it took a minute for what he'd done to his office to register.
The office wasn't especially large. Our bedroom was about twice its size, the living room four or five times bigger. When we'd moved into the house, he'd set it up exactly as it had been before he'd left, and it had always been very full. To your right, as you entered, was his desk, which was fairly modest and held his computer. In the middle of the room, there was a large, heavy oak table where he would lay out whatever materials he required for his latest undertaking. This table had its own chair, an old kitchen leftover that creaked and swayed and threatened to collapse under you. He liked to sit at the table and make extensive notes—really, they were more rough drafts. To your left, there was a couch where Roger could sit and read—it folded out into a bed, and was where—well, you've heard that part of the story already, haven't you? The room was ringed with floor-to-ceiling bookcases, most of which were stuffed with the lifetime of material on Dickens Roger had collected, including first editions of most of his novels. Directly across from the doorway was a window that looked out on the back lawn. There wasn't much wall space. Over his desk, Roger had hung an oversized bulletin board that was layered with pictures and postcards, the majority of them of Dickens and his friends. He'd taped a few posters and flyers to the bookcase shelves, pretty much all of which had to do with him: lectures that he'd given, conferences he'd been the keynote speaker at, books he'd written. I suppose he was entitled.
All that had been changed. Everything was still in the same place—as far as I could tell—but now every last inch of the office had been covered in maps. I recognized their subject immediately. How could I not? In the past years, we'd all seen Afghanistan's broken oval enough times on the news and in print to know its outline. Hanging to the left of the window was an enormous map that completely obscured the bookcase it was taped to. It was some kind of National Geographic special that displayed not only the country's topography and settlements, but the sites of all the battles in the recent U.S. war. The country was colored desert-brown, outlined in a white line and, around that, a yellow line. All the surrounding countries were white, blank spaces. Roger had written on the map. I couldn't read the words from the doorway, but I could see that they clustered next to Kabul, which he'd circled in black magic marker. No, it wasn't a circle; it was a spiral whose tail descended into the city.
There were other maps of the country—other kinds of maps—hanging from the rest of the bookcases like elaborate paper drapes. None was as big as the map across from me. A few were a couple of feet wide, but most looked as if they'd been photocopied from textbooks. There was another map of Afghanistan's geography, which was next to one of those maps that show height and depth in gradations—what do you call them? Mercator maps? One color-coded map revealed the country's average rainfall amounts; another, the type and distribution of its principle crops; a third estimated its population density. A largish map broke the place down into
its various tribes and ethnicities; a larger map than that marked the ebb and flow of its historical borders. A cluster of smaller maps showed the country's margins at specific historical moments. Some maps were satellite photos with borders superimposed; others looked like they'd been drawn by British cartographers during the heyday of the Empire.
Mixed in with the outlines of Afghanistan were other pieces of paper, which I recognized as maps, too, though I couldn't tell of what. There was the same variety to them, the same mix of different reference points, of new and old. Then I saw the word "Kabul" at the top of one. Every last one of these maps was covered in Roger's handwriting, in three or four different colors of ink. He'd put stickers on some of the maps—those little round ones they use for the prices at flea markets and church fairs—which he used to anchor pieces of thread connecting one map to another. Two or three Post-It notes dangled from each map of Kabul, and more filled what little space remained on the bookcases.