He was terrified. He was also strangely excited, avidly wondering what might happen next.
Once, he remembers clearly, he did manage to stir himself to speed away from the pursuing wind: a dark, stinger-shape of a tornado, darting here and there on the landscape to pierce and explode whatever it touched. As fast as he could, much faster than he dared, he drove to a place where he had heard a shelter had been built into the side of a mountain, obscured by kudzu and dark itself, but safer than being out here on the open road. The tornado sewed the ground behind him with needles of splintered wood and a thread of braided earth. He stopped the car in the mud and was out and running before the engine had died, ripping apart the ravenous vines and on the first try finding the door to the shelter that really existed, desperately lowering himself into the dark and violent hole. Just as his head sank below ground level, the tornado struck, and all hell broke loose inches above him. Things fell on him, hurting, bruising, bouncing off. There wasn’t enough air. But he was out of the storm.
Halfway down, though, he felt the shaft begin to contort around him, pinching his skin and yanking at his bones. The light around him turned red and wet. He realized that what he had mistaken for shelter was the heart of the tornado itself, its howl so loud it would fracture his skull because it wasn’t the tornado after all, its howl so loud because what he had climbed down into was the throat of his father, whose rage and pain spun the world.
Steve doesn’t like to drive anymore. He jokes that the one advantage of Alzheimer’s would be that then Melanie and the kids wouldn’t let him.
“Steve,” says Melanie, “what’s making you so afraid? There’s nothing to be afraid of, honey. We’re safe.” He doesn’t answer, which is probably just as well. Seeing that he’s dozed off, she kisses his haggard cheek and goes to make dinner. Maybe she can get him to eat something tonight.
It’s almost five o’clock; Katy’s mother will be dropping her off soon. Melanie will make her special macaroni and cheese. Once Katy said to her, with that heart-stopping solemnity that has been characteristic of her since before she could talk, “Grandma, your macaroni and cheese is the best in the world.” So Melanie makes it almost every time Katy comes for a meal, and is afraid to ask if the child’s taste might have changed. If there’s a jar of applesauce in the cupboard, which she thinks there is, that would be nice with macaroni and cheese; Steve sometimes likes applesauce.
It isn’t that Melanie is never afraid. Like most others of her species, she’s probably encountered primal fear, as well as primal bliss and irritability and curiosity and hunger and satiation, from the moment of birth, maybe from the moment of conception. Maybe even earlier; she’s not sure what she believes about that. She was about eight, Katy’s age, the first time she was aware of being scared— really scared, scared to her bones, soul-scared.
As long as she could remember, her mother had been taking Melanie, in a rather desultory and uncommitted fashion, to either the little red Methodist church or the little white Lutheran church in the nearest town. Melanie never could detect much difference between the two, and she didn’t think her mother could, either. Both had organ music and stained glass windows. From both, you came out of a dim sanctuary into bells and bright light—this having been northwest Pennsylvania, probably not sunshine as often as she now seems to recall.
The two churches never made much of an impact on her, beyond a vague sense of comfort that probably had more to do with music and light and cookies than with God. Not much about either of them would she as an adult term spiritual. But the religion was nothing if not organized.
Her father had spurned the Methodists and Lutherans; she’d picked up his scorn. Finally his proud agnosticism took the family to the Unitarians in the big columned brick building on the square—called Diamond Park, which encouraged the space to be regarded from its tip rather than its straight side—of the larger town eleven miles away.
Organized socially, politically, and intellectually rather than spiritually, but definitely organized, the Unitarians claimed to have no creed. But Melanie, perhaps out of her own need to tame the nature of the most important things by imposing human order, believed these wise, warm people, whom her revered father obviously revered, were teaching that there was no afterlife. That heaven and hell were metaphors—which is to say, in the parlance of an eight-year-old, lies. That when you died you were just dead, you just didn’t exist any more. And, in some way which made use of both instinct and developing cognition, she really, really understood.
What began then to visit her in the night was mortal fear pure and simple, direct, utterly unmetaphorical. No monsters under the bed. No white-gowned ladies raising knives. With the force of epiphany, she was suddenly terrified of death.
Crying herself to sleep replaced the gentle self-stimulation and release that had long been her bedtime ritual. Now, the moment she started slipping into unconsciousness, it would feel like dying and she’d scream herself awake. Or she’d leap out of sleep as if pursued by God or the Devil, heart in her ears. Hardly ever was she afraid of anything during the day, but at night fear of death, once discovered, wouldn’t leave her alone.
When this started, her father or mother would come to her. She never doubted their love, but this might have been the first time she doubted their omnipotence. They didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know what to say. Later, amused, Melanie would realize they hadn’t known what to do or say about the masturbation, either.
They’d sit with her for a while, and she’d calm herself enough to get them to leave because she didn’t want to upset them and because their helplessness made the fear worse. Eventually they didn’t come in anymore, and that seemed right. Even then, it was obvious to her that she had to do this alone.
The cuckoo clock in the living room strikes 5:00. It has run slow for as long as Steve can remember. He tries not to read anything into its persistent loss of time, only reminds himself of the fact—not really a fact, more a construct, a necessary but not fundamental imposed order—that the correct time is a few minutes after five. Though he’s seldom hungry, he likes the sounds Melanie makes in the kitchen.
More and more frequently, thoughts enter his mind like beads on a string, discrete, in some way connected but willing to fly off at the slightest tug. He’s learned to stay still for them:
We’ve brought it all upon ourselves, just by staying alive. The terrors of the world are hungry by nature and they smell our independent brain. The shadows in the dark are changing and soon will come after us one by one.
Melanie is singing. Steve thinks he might sing, too. By the clock on the kitchen radio it’s 5:09; the microwave clock says 5:10. Melanie is thinking about the wilderness canoe trip she took a number of summers ago with Joe, who was then fifteen but still willing to spend ten days on a lake in the northern Canadian wilderness with his mother and six people he didn’t know. She wonders if he’d be willing now, if he had the chance. She wonders if she would be.
It’s 5:10, or 5:11, or, by the cuckoo clock, 5:07. Steve sits still for the thought to surface in his mind: it is essential that we learn how to live in a world full of monsters. When they put ashore and started setting up camp the second night out on the adventure she could not believe she’d signed up for, Melanie abruptly began trembling and her breath turned fast and shallow. Having expected to be frightened at the beginning of the trip and then been only excited and amazed to be doing this, she felt both ambushed and vindicated when the fear came now, hot and strong. On more than one adventure in her life she’d learned and then forgotten that fear has its own rhythms and will be met when it will be met.
She kept losing her footing in the mud. Three times she pounded the same tent stake in at different wrong angles, so of course it wouldn’t hold. Her shoulders ached from eight hours at the oars. Need for a hot shower was urgent; anticipation of nine more days without one approached misery. She’d never set up a tent until last night. She’d never before been camping in her adult li
fe. The only other time she’d been in a canoe was decades earlier at Camp Wa-Lu-Hi-Yi, and of that she remembered only the fact of it, no sensory detail or emotional residue, as if what she remembered was being told about it.
But physical discomfort and situational uncertainty were not what had her hyperventilating on the canvas floor of the tent, knees drawn up, arms crossed hard over her belly. This was mortal terror, and she had felt it before.
She’s been told that when her visual disability was discovered, her parents withdrew in shock and grief and guilt, and the doctor recommended she be sent a hundred miles away to the School for the Blind. The infant Melanie must have sensed the abandonment and threatened abandonment, must have felt unloved and unworthy and alone, though it was not anyone’s fault and though it took her parents only a little while to regain most of their equilibrium and proceed with raising a handicapped child. They did not send her away. But at her core, as at the core of the species, there is aloneness. Also at the core are community, connection, the myriad forms of love. And, perhaps at the core of the core, a borderless, impersonal sense of belonging, a transcendent sense of place that is most comforting and most terrifying of all.
She was afraid like that on her first silent weekend retreat. “Noble silence,” they called it, for linguistic and theological reasons she hasn’t yet figured out; not only did you not talk for two days, but you also didn’t use gestures or body language, make eye contact, acknowledge another’s presence or allow your own to be acknowledged. You were alone, in the nobly silent company of others who were alone. Why should that be terrifying? Why should it feel like death? She goes on silent weekend retreats as often as she can find them.
She’d been afraid at the house in the mountains by herself. It was the borderlessness that got to her, even within the borders of a short, pre-defined, self-initiated stay. Although the silence was by no means complete, its shape continually squished and stretched, amoebic, searching for a container. She could eat, sleep, write, take a bath any time she wanted to, and there was little reason to do any of those things at one time rather than another. When she climbed down the rough, steep slope to sit on a head-high boulder with her back against a lodgepole pine, she could hear airplanes, construction equipment, barking dogs, entire conversations not even in the distance, but those sounds had no more to do with her personally than did the susurrus of wind in pines, and nobody knew she was there except the worried spaniel who, too fat and bow-legged and cranky to clamber up beside her, glowered at her from the base of the rock. Disoriented and frightened, she went there often, and the spaniel, not entertaining the option of staying behind, never forgave her.
She’d been afraid like that again when suddenly her vision changed and she didn’t know where she was in space and something moved.
Just at the horizon of her newly-truncated field of vision, something moved. Melanie didn’t precisely see but somehow perceived all sorts of benign motion, none of which could account for this terror: Sunlight across a wooden floor. Shadows of leaves in a breeze. The curve of the chair rocker under her own weight. Inability to identify anything to fear intensified her fear. She could hardly breathe.
Something moved. Why should that be terrifying?
Mindful of her retina newly detached and partially, precariously repaired, she overrode the self-defensive instinct to snap her head around toward the danger. Instead, face approximately parallel to the floor per doctor’s orders, she pivoted smoothly, stealthily, on the off-chance of catching the fear in the act. She knew she was opening herself to both discovery and disaster.
Sunlight, leaf-shadows, rocker motion, the black-and-white cat coming as usual to investigate human distress. Whatever the danger was, it was outside her field of vision, always had been and always would be.
Enormous wings. High black wind. Rustling and flapping loud enough to break the sound barrier, to break all barriers. She cried out, dodged, covered her head.
The very edge of a precipice under her feet, under her knees, under her chest when she flung herself sobbing to the floor. “I’ve never known you to be like this,” Steve said, and she couldn’t answer but thought wildly, That’s right. You haven’t. Neither have I.
And then at the eye of the rising, swirling purple and black, a flash of awe made itself known, awe rather than fear, the pearl in the dragon’s mouth, the fire at the heart of the world.
All this because her vision had changed, and not even significantly; it wasn’t as if she’d ever been fully sighted. All this because she no longer knew where she was in space and time. As if she ever really had. As if anybody does.
So here she was again, terrified in some way that felt primal and primordial, curled up in the tent that probably wouldn’t stay upright through the night. The young guide came and settled herself—wisely, outside the tent, making her presence known through the mesh in the closed flap without approaching too near. “How you doin’, Melanie?”
Melanie managed to breathe hello and thank you, but was caught up in a fierce, repetitive internal dialogue: “I can’t do this!” “And what do you imagine you’ll do instead?”
The thought rolls into Steve’s mind like a loose bead: it is crucial that we name all the parts of the country where we live.
“I can’t do this! I can’t! I can’t do this!”
In their introduction, the guides had announced— rather gleefully, Melanie thought—that this was, in fact, a wilderness trip, and in a real emergency the Royal Canadian Mounted Police would have to trek in to the rescue. Even Melanie, even in her escalating panic, didn’t think this called for the Mounties. In part, she was embarrassed. The fact that she could identify nothing to be afraid of made her feel both foolish and more afraid. Anxiety about whether she had the physical stamina to keep up would have been understandable—the oldest in the group by at least twenty years, and not especially athletic, she had expected to feel a little out of place and wary. She had not expected terror, raising its knife. Adrenaline looped through her like a siren. She couldn’t stop shaking. Maybe the organism recognized a threat the conscious mind could not. Maybe she really was in mortal danger, from a source unknown and unknowable. Maybe she always had been.
Twilight over Lake Nipigon unnerved her, and she couldn’t imagine why. Everybody else, even Joe, was exclaiming over the beauty of sunset reflected in water reflected in sky reflected in water, and Melanie could tell that it was beautiful, but she found it spooky. Birds called. The surface of the lake was broken repeatedly by creatures who didn’t show themselves. Large animal tracks cratered the sand. But she was not afraid of the birds, or the jumping fish, or whatever had made the tracks, even if, as her son hopefully suggested, it was a bear. She was afraid, somehow, of the light on the water, and being afraid of that was terrifying.
The guide spoke comfortably, as if they both had all the time in the world. “What you’re feeling is pretty common. We call it hitting the quarter-mark.”
Because Melanie didn’t know the term, it sounded exotic, arcane. “Hitting what?”
“The quarter-mark. About a quarter of the way into the trip, a lot of people get panicky. Especially first-timers.”
And do the Mounties come to the rescue?” She tried to laugh.
“You don’t need rescuing. Just go with it and you’ll be fine.”
The guide’s kindness and competence allowed her not so much to feel safe as to accept feeling profoundly unsafe. Now she dumps multi-colored pasta into boiling water, Melanie remembers, and her eyes fill with grateful tears. The fear ran its course. Before she came out of that particular wilderness, she would feel many other things: exhilaration, exhaustion, intense physical discomfort, intense physical satisfaction, uneasiness, peace, comradeship with her son, estrangement from him. She would not again, on that trip, know terror. Twilight on Lake Nipigon, a particular and not entirely visual opalescence, would stay with her for the rest of her life.
Steve is allowing space in his mind for two glittery spherical
thoughts that carom off each other: There will always be intruders in our bedrooms, insisting they aren’t intruders at all, they belong there as much as we do. And: There are angels and demons and giant goats and ladies in white, messengers who come from the eternal with important things to say.
It’s 5:17 by at least one clock. Whisking flour into melted margarine and, while it’s thickening in the microwave, grating the cheese—a task she finds tedious but can think of, with some bemusement, as a little self-sacrifice for someone she loves—Melanie is gazing dreamily out the west window over the sink at the quite different but also opalescent city twilight when a plane falls out of the sky.
Bored with his own ruminations, Steve is just getting up to help her set the table. He’s not fast enough to avoid another bullet-like thought: These are our preparations, our practice sessions. These nightly assignations are our daily meals of darkness. He’s both hungry and too full to take another bite.
Brief buzz of low-flying aircraft. A soft bang, like someone hitting a garbage can. Steve and Melanie turn to each other, as they’ve learned to do. “What—?” The power goes out. Yelling outside. Sirens, more sirens, mad and purposeful, terrifying in their intent to protect, all coming here.
Melanie has to tend to the cheese sauce, but Steve fumbles his way outside. The neighborhood reeks of airplane fuel. People are streaming onto the sidewalk and street and fire trucks are already pulling up. The neighbor kid insists a plane has gone down in the next block, but Steve knows better than to believe anything this loud and self-important boy says. When the cheese sauce can be left, though with unmelted lumps she won’t be able to do anything about, Melanie finds flashlights, candles, and the little battery-operated television she and the kids have teased Steve for buying.
The story emerges. Two small planes, a Cessna and a Piper Cheyenne, have collided virtually over their house, which is the highest structure for several blocks around, a tall house and on a hill. One has landed upside down, with an eerie neatness between a neighbor’s garage and the alley. Its sheared wing fell in another yard, a tire in another, a piece of the engine just off the street about a hundred yards from Melanie and Steve’s back gate.
The Man on the Ceiling Page 13