by Peter Straub
I thought Olson would write checks until they started to bounce. The credit card company was going to get burned, because Don would see the card as nothing more than cash in instantly available form. To establish credit, he would pay his first month’s bill. After that, everything was uncertain.
Feeling like the midwife to a criminal career, I accepted Don’s offer to buy me lunch at Big Bowl, the Chinese restaurant near the corner of Cedar and Rush. After we ordered, Olson surprised me. “You’re going to ask me to drive to Madison and visit Hootie Bly with you, aren’t you?”
The chopsticks nearly jittered out of my hand.
“Let me go you one better. How would you like to talk to Meredith Bright? Meredith Bingham Walsh, as she is now.”
“What are you saying?”
“If you’re interested, I can probably arrange for you to meet Meredith. Hootie isn’t going to say anything that makes sense, but Mrs. Walsh might give you something useful. I don’t know, I’m just guessing here.”
“The vampire married to the senator? How can you do that?”
“It’s a long story,” Don said. “I think I amuse her. She sent me one of those checks.” He watched me as he sliced a soup dumpling in half and lifted one of the halves out of the bowl. “I guess you’re really into finding out what happened out there in that meadow. It’s like you think everyone saw the same thing, like all of us had the same experience. Is that what you think?”
“I guess I did, yes. Once. But not anymore.”
“What changed your mind?”
“A couple of years ago, I ran into Boats on the sidewalk outside the Pfister. This was even before I started getting interested in the Ladykiller.” An extremely specific memory returned to me. “He was carrying a suitcase. Uh-oh, I said to myself. He’s really still at it. That suitcase probably had a lot of other people’s cash and other people’s jewelry inside it. Plus whatever else he felt like stealing.”
“You gotta give him this,” Don said. “Man has a hell of a work ethic.”
“Seen one way, I guess. Anyhow, we recognized each other and he felt like talking, so we went inside and sat in that lobby bar, that lounge. With the big tables, and all the staircases? I thought he’d be nervous, but he said it was actually a very safe place for him to spend the next half hour or so.”
Olson laughed, and said, “Good plan.”
“So we were sitting there, just talking like two normal guys, and I realized that he might actually tell me something about that day. Back then, he barely even looked at me in the hallways. Hootie was in the bin. Lee refused to say anything. And you were off God knows where.”
“Right down the street, at least for a while.”
“Anyhow, when we were in the Pfister’s lounge, I brought it up. ‘Didn’t you talk about this with your wife?’ he asked, and I said, ‘Well, I tried.’ ’No way, huh?’ he said. Then he said that a lot of time had passed, and he might be able to tell me something. ‘It was horrible, though,’ he told me. And he said you were the only other person he had ever spoken of this with.”
Olson nodded. “Four, five years ago, in Madison. He has a little hideout there, a crummy room near the stadium, and he just waited for me to come through town. We got together after one of my initial meetings with the students, like that one you didn’t go to at La Bella Capri. He was shook up—couldn’t get it out of his mind. That picture.”
“A tower of dead children, he said. With little arms and legs sticking out.”
“And some heads, too. Did he cry, when you were talking?”
“He cried with you, too?”
Olson nodded. “It was when he tried to tell me that most of the dead kids were sort of folded over. ‘Like tacos,’ he said. And after that, he couldn’t keep it together anymore.”
“Amazing. That’s just what happened with me. ‘Like tacos,’ and boom, he’s in tears, he’s shaking, he can’t say another word for about five minutes, he just keeps making these ‘I’m sorry’ gestures with his hands.”
“Hell of a thing to see,” Don said. “But he didn’t see much else.”
“No. Just a big tower made of dead children. And a lot of blinding red-orange light, light the color of Kool-Aid, streaming in.”
“That’s what I said to him! He’s such a thief, he steals other people’s words. Anyhow, that light was really foul. Streamed in on us like through some crack in the world. One of the worst smells ever. I’m sure we all went through that. Unfortunately for you, I never managed to see a lot. There was one thing, though.”
“Yes?”
“Well, two things, actually. The first one was this dog, standing up inside a little room with a rolltop desk. He was wearing a dark-brown suit, two-tone shoes, and a bow tie. You know how guys with bow ties can sometimes give you this look, like you just farted and they hope you’ll go away before they have to ask you to leave? Pity and contempt. That’s the way he was looking at me.”
“Oh, that poster,” I said.
“No, not that poster Eel’s dad gave her. He wasn’t anything like those dogs. He wasn’t cute, not at all. This guy was sorry to see me, and he wanted me to go away.”
“But there was something else, too.”
“Jesus, have a little patience, will you? I’m getting to it. Mallon grabbed me by the elbow and yanked me away, but just before he pulled on my arm I saw that the dog was trying to hide something from me—things I was not supposed to see. These things were more like men, but bright, almost shiny, as if they were made of mercury or something. And they scared the shit out of me. One of them was a woman, not a man, a woman like a queen, and she had this stick in her hand, and I knew that the stick was called a distaff. How I knew I had no idea, but that’s what the thing was called. The whole thing scared the shit out of me. It terrified me. No, it horrified me, it filled me with horror. If Spencer hadn’t yanked me sideways, I would never have been able to move.”
“You told this to Boats, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. He was a lot more interested in his dead children. He asked me if I thought it could have been real. I said, ‘It was probably real somewhere, Jason.’”
That evening we made several necessary telephone calls, and after that secured reservations at the Concourse Hotel. The following morning, we drove 150 miles north to Madison. For 140 of those miles, we were on I-90 West, for most of our journey a highway with little to recommend it but simplicity and ease of use. Exits for villages and small towns, mileage signs, and billboards appeared, but the towns themselves did not, nor did the restaurants, motels, and roadside attractions advertised in the billboards. From the highway nothing was visible but the few farmhouses and fewer hills that punctuated a wide, flat landscape of fields and trees. For long stretches, three or four cars moving in a huddle fifty yards ahead were the only other vehicles in sight.
Don Olson said, “Slow down, damn it. You’re scaring me.”
The speedometer revealed that I had been stepping along at eighty-eight miles per hour. “Sorry.” I took my foot off the accelerator. “It snuck up on me.”
Olson caressed the top of the dashboard with a bony hand. “Man, everything you have is beautiful, isn’t it? Me, I got nothing at all. That’s fine with me, by the way. I had your stuff, I’d be worried sick about trying to protect it.”
“You’d adjust after a while.”
“How fast does this old baby go, anyhow?”
“Around two o’clock one night, I was all alone on the highway. Bombed out of my skull. I got it up to a hundred and thirty. Then I got scared. That was the last time I ever did anything like that.”
“You hit a hundred and thirty when you were drunk at two in the morning?”
“Stupid, I know.”
“It also sounds very, very unhappy, man.”
“Well,” I said, and offered no more.
“Spencer used to say, everybody runs around looking for happiness when they ought to seek joy.”
“You have to earn joy,” I said.
“I’ve known joy. Long time ago.” Olson laughed. “Spencer once told me the only time he experienced absolute joy was in the meadow, just before everything exploded.”
Olson was still sitting sideways, facing me, one leg drawn up onto the car seat, almost grinning.
“This is out of left field, I know.”
“All right,” Olson said.
“Did you ever sleep with Lee when we were all back in high school?”
“With the Eel?” Laughing, Olson held up his right hand, palm out, as if taking an oath. “For God’s sake, no. Me and Boats and Hootie, we were all madly in love with Meredith Bright. Give me a break, man. You’d have to be a rat to go after another guy’s girlfriend. I had more principles than that. Anyhow, I always thought you and the Eel were doing it on a daily basis, more or less.”
I must have displayed rubber-faced amazement. “I didn’t think anybody knew that.”
“I didn’t know it … but I sure had the feeling that, you know.”
“We tried so hard to—”
“It worked, man. Nobody in our school knew that you and the Eel were having more sex than the rest of us combined, faculty included.”
That was probably true, I supposed. Lee Truax and I had progressed to actual intercourse on our fourth (or according to her, our fifth) get-together—encounters too informal to be called dates. At a party during our freshman year, we, by then long an informal couple, had wandered into an empty bedroom and followed our history of kisses, touches, partial disrobings and revelations, to its natural conclusion. We were stunningly, amazingly lucky. Our first experiences of sex were almost totally pleasurable. Within weeks, the mutual discovery of her clitoris led to her first orgasm. (Later, we referred to this day, October 25, as “the Fourth of July.”) And we knew from the first that this miracle depended for its survival upon silence and secrecy.
At times, as our erotic life receded over the course of our long marriage, I permitted myself to speculate that my far-wandering wife may have taken a number of lovers. I forgave her for the pain this possibility caused me, for I knew that I, not she, had inflicted most of the heavy-duty damage on our marriage. When we were in our mid-twenties, Lee had mysteriously left me, demanding “space” and “time by myself.” Two months later she reappeared, without explanation of where she had been or what she had done. She said she loved and needed me. The Eel had chosen me again.
And then … ten years later, my prolonged, on-and-off infidelity with the brilliant young woman who had agented The Agents of Darkness and thereby permanently changed my life had, I now thought, broken my marriage. That, that was what did it. The affair went on too long; or it should never have ended. Maybe I should have divorced Lee and married the agent. In my world, such recombinations happened all the time: men were forever leaving their wives and trading up, then divorcing and trading up again—editors, authors, publicists, publishing executives, foreign rights people, agents, all in a perpetual roundelay. I had been, however, too stubborn to leave my wife. How could I compound the betrayal I had already committed? That single act would have turned us into clichés—an abandoned wife, a newly successful man who had dumped his longtime spouse for the sexy younger woman who had aided that success. It was impossible that we should become such cartoons.
Yet the essence of our marriage had been broken.
Or maybe, I thought, this was the essence of our marriage: that we had come through so much pain, not just then but other times, too, and managed to stay together and love each other in a tougher, deeper way.
At the worst times, though, I wondered if our marriage had not been broken from the beginning, or from near the beginning, probably around the time I was pretending to be a scholar and Lee Truax tended bar in the East Village. Well, no, that was out of the question. One of the reasons I cherished Lee Truax was that she had stuck with me, she had hung in there.
Madison and Milwaukee
In spite of everything, it always feels good to get back to Madison,” Olson said.
“I haven’t been here for thirty years,” I said. “Lee has, though. A couple of times. Apparently, it’s changed a lot. Really good restaurants, a jazz club, whatever.”
At the intersection of Wisconsin and West Dayton Street, I stopped at a red light and put on my turn signal. Down West Dayton, I thought I could make out the entrances to the hotel and its garage.
The light turned green. I swung the big car around the corner and aimed for the entrance to the garage. “Hey, did I bring that book I signed for Hootie?”
“Do you know how boring it is to answer the same question over and over?”
“I asked you that before?”
“Twice,” Olson said. “You must be even more nervous than I am.”
After we checked into our rooms on the fourteenth floor and unpacked, I called the Lamont Hospital and spoke to the staff psychiatrist with whom I had spoken that morning. Dr. Greengrass said things still looked good. “All I can say is, keep things on an even keel and everything ought to be fine. It’s remarkable, but Howard has been showing us some fine progress over the past eight or nine months. Despite all these years he’s been in our community, I might almost say … Of course, with his family all gone, and no friends on the outside except yourself and Mr. Olson, his situation isn’t likely to change all that much, is it?”
Although I was not precisely sure what the doctor was talking about, I agreed. “He’s been showing progress?”
His laughter surprised me. “For most of the time he’s been in our facility, Howard has had very specific language sources. I wasn’t around in those days, but from the case notes made soon after his admission in 1966, it seems all of his vocabulary came from some extraordinary dictionary.”
“Captain Fountain. Good God. I’d almost forgotten about that.”
“As you will appreciate, the decision to limit himself to a particularly obscure vocabulary represented a means of controlling the terror that brought him to us. His parents felt they had to consign him to medical supervision. From what I gather, they made the right decision. Most of the people working here, medical staff and attendants, had no idea what he was saying ninety percent of the time. You have to add to this that to keep him from being a risk to himself and the other patients Mr. Bly needed to be heavily medicated. We’re talking about the period from his year of intake, 1966, to about 1983, roughly. At that time, the doctor in charge of his case judged him ready for a reduction in medication, which in any case had become far more sophisticated. The results were quite gratifying.”
“He began to talk? To use a standard vocabulary?” For several reasons, that would have been extremely good news.
“Not exactly. After the adjustment in his medication, Mr. Bly began to speak in long, beautifully formed sentences and paragraphs, bits of dialogue, and so forth. We eventually discovered that almost everything he said came from the Hawthorne novel The Scarlet Letter. Captain Fountain provided the remainder.”
“He used to quote from The Scarlet Letter back in high school,” I said.
“Does he remember everything he reads?”
“Yes. I think he does.”
“I ask because he seems to have added a book he just finished reading. It was lying on a table in the Game Room. A kind of a romance novel, or maybe what is called a gothic. The Moondreamers, I think. By L. Shelby Austin?”
“Never heard of it,” I said.
“Neither had I, but it’s had an excellent effect on your friend. Howard’s become much more expressive.”
“Does he know we’re coming?”
“Oh, yes. He’s very excited. Very nervous, too. After all, Howard hasn’t had a visitor for thirty-one years. This morning, he spent hours deciding what to wear for you. And it’s not like he has much of a wardrobe! When I asked him how he felt, he said, ‘Anabiotic.’”
“The Captain.”
“Fortunately, when Howard was admitted, his mother included his copy of Captain Fountain’s book in
his box of belongings. She thought we would find it useful. To say that we did would be to understate. For a long time, it was the only way we had to understand him. Over the years, the book now and again vanished from view, but it always resurfaced. I keep it in my desk now, so it won’t get lost. Do you know the word anabiotic?”
“Never heard it before.”
“It’s an adjective, of course, and as nearly as I remember, it means ‘thought to be dead, but capable of being brought back to life.’ Your visit means a lot to Howard.”
Unfamiliar with mental wards, I had been imagining some Gothic stone pile from a Hammer film, and when the sturdy brick facade of the Lamont Hospital came into view at the end of a winding drive my first reaction was relief. Four stories high and comfortably broad, the building suggested warmth, competence, and security. Rows of handsome windows in ornamental embrasures looked out upon a wide expanse of parkland threaded with paths and green cast-iron benches. “Do you think this place can actually be as nice on the inside as it is on the outside?” I asked.
“Don’t hold your breath,” Olson said.
Inside, a short flight of marble steps led up to a well-lighted hallway lined with shining pebble-dash windows set into massive black doors. I had been expecting a desk and a receptionist, and I spun around, reading the black legends hand-lettered on the windows. ACCOUNTING. BUSINESS. RECORDS.
Seeming muted by his institutional surroundings, Don Olson caught my eye and wordlessly pointed out the door marked ADMISSION & RECEPTION. “Thanks,” I said, to break the silence.
Unwilling to be point man, Olson inclined his head toward the door.
Inside, four plastic chairs against a pale blue wall faced a long white counter where papers had been clamped into clipboards with ballpoint pens awkwardly attached on lengths of hairy string. A stout woman with bangs and thick glasses looked up at us from a desk behind the counter. Before I reached her, she turned away to say something to a pretty, sharp-featured South Asian woman, Ceylonese or Indian, who promptly stood up and vanished through a door at the rear of the office. Next to the door hung a large framed photograph of a red barn in a yellow field. The barn looked as though it had not been used in a long while.