The Knife Thrower

by Steven Millhauser

  A broken bar of moonlight lay across the dishrack, fell sharply along a door below the counter, bent halfway along the linoleum before stopping in shadow.

  She sat across from me with her hands on the silver strip at the edge of the counter, swinging her legs in and out of moonlight. Her knees were pressed together, but her calves were parted, and one foot was half-turned toward the other. I could see her anklebones. Her dungarees were rolled into thick cuffs halfway up the calf, one slightly higher than the other. As her calves swung back against the counter, they became wider for a moment, before they swung out. The gentle swinging, the widening and narrowing calves, the rolled-up cuffs, the rubbery ribs of the dishrack, the glimmer of window above the mesh of the screen, all this seemed to me as mysterious as the summer moonlight, which had driven me through the night to this kitchen, where it glittered on knives and forks sticking out of the silverware box at the end of the dishrack and on her calves, swinging back and forth.

  Now and then Sonja picked up her glass and, leaning back her head, took a rattling drink of soda. I could see the column of her throat moving as she swallowed, and it seemed to me that although she was only sitting there, she was moving all over: her legs swung back and forth, her throat moved, her hands moved from the counter to the glass and back, and something seemed to come quivering up out of her, as if she’d swallowed a piece of burning-cool moonlight and were releasing it through her legs and fingertips.

  Through the window screen I could see the moonlit grass of the back yard, the yellow plastic bat on the grass, a corner of shingled garage and a piece of purplish-blue night, and I could hear Marcia talking quietly, the faint rumble of trucks rolling through the sky, a sharp, clicking insect.

  I felt bound in the dark blue spell of the kitchen, of the calves swinging back and forth, the glittering silverware, moonlight on linoleum, silence that seemed to be filling up with something like a stretching skin, somewhere a quivering, and I standing still, in the spell of it all, watchful. Her hands gripped the edge of the counter. Her calves moved back and forth under pressed-together knees. She was leaning forward at the waist, her eyes shone like black moonlight, there was a tension in her arms that I could feel in my own arms, a tension that rippled up into her throat, and suddenly she burst out laughing.

  “What are you laughing at?” I said, startled, disappointed.

  “Oh, nothing,” she said, slipping down from the counter. “Everything. You, for example.” She walked over to the screen door. “Let’s call it a night, gang,” she said, opening the door. The three girls were sitting on the steps.

  Marcia, taking a deep breath, slowly stretched out her arms and arched her back; and as her lumberjack shirt flattened against her, she seemed to be lifting her breasts toward the blue night sky, the summer moon.

  Then there were quick good nights and all three were walking across the lawn, turning out of sight behind the garage.

  “This way, my good man,” Sonja said. Frowning, and putting a finger over her lips, she led me from the kitchen through the shadowy living room, where I caught bronze and glass gleams—the edge of the fire shovel, a lamp base, the black glass of the television screen. At the front door flanked by thin strips of glass she turned the knob and opened the wooden door, held open the screen door. Behind her a flight of carpeted stairs rose into darkness. “Fair Knight,” she said, with a little mock curtsey, “farewell,” and pushed me out the door. I saw her arm rise and felt her fingers touch my face. With a laugh she shut the door.

  It had happened so quickly that I wasn’t sure what it was that had happened. Somewhere between “farewell” and laughter a different thing had happened, an event from a higher, more hidden realm, something connected with the dark blue kitchen, the glittering silverware and swinging legs, the mystery of the blue summer night. It was as if, under the drifting-down light of the moon, under the white-blue light that kept soaking into things, dissolving the day-world, a new shape had been released.

  I stood for a while in front of the darkened front door, as if waiting for it to turn into something else—a forest path, a fluttering curtain. Then I walked away from the house along red-black slabs of slate, looked back once over my shoulder at the dark windows, and turned onto the sidewalk under high oaks and elms.

  I felt a new lightness in my chest, as if an impediment to breathing had been removed. It was a night of revelations, but I now saw that each particle of the night was equal to the others. The moonlit path of black notes on the page of the music book, the yellow bat lying on just those blades of grass, the precise tilt of each knife in the dishrack, Sonja’s calves swinging in and out of moonlight, Marcia’s slowly arching back, the hand rising toward my face, all this was as unique and unrepeatable as the history of an ancient kingdom. For I had wanted to take a little walk before going to bed, but I had stepped from my room into the first summer night, the only summer night.

  Under the high trees the moonlight fell steadily. I could see it sifting down through the leaves. All night long it had fallen into back yards, on chimneys and stop signs, on the crosspieces of telephone poles and on sidewalks buckled by tree roots. Down through the leaves it was slowly sifting, sticking to the warm air, forming clumps in the leaf-shadows. I could feel the moonlight lying on my hands. A weariness came over me, a weariness trembling with exhilaration. I had the sensation that I was expanding, growing lighter. Under the branches the air was becoming denser with moonlight, I could scarcely push my way through. My feet seemed to be pressing down on thick, spongy air. I felt an odd buoyancy, and when I looked down I saw that I was walking a little above the sidewalk. I raised my foot and stepped higher. Then I began to climb the thick tangle of moonlight and shadow, slipping now and then, sinking a little, pulling myself up with the aid of branches, and soon I came out over the top of a tree into the clearness of the moon. Dark fields of blue air stretched away in every direction. I looked down at the moonlit leaves below, at the top of a streetlamp, at shafts of moonlight slanting like white ladders under the leaves. I walked carefully forward above the trees, taking light steps that sank deep, then climbed a little higher, till catching a breeze I felt myself borne away into the blue countries of the night.

  THE DREAM OF THE CONSORTIUM

  THE PURCHASE OF the department store by the consortium filled us with uneasiness and secret hope. The department store was the last of the grand old emporiums in our city; from earliest childhood we had ridden its aging escalators and wandered its faded departments. Our very idea of excess, of wonder, had been formed by its shelves of merchandise stretching into brown distances and rising through all twelve floors. In the glare of the new glass mall the old stores had vanished one by one, already our visits to the fading department store had become tinged with resignation and melancholy. Therefore the purchase of the department store by the consortium was a sharp blow, even a devastation, but at the same time a solace, for hadn’t we always known that our store was nothing but an awkward survivor, almost an embarrassment, in a certain sense an illusion?

  From the very first it was said that the consortium planned to preserve the block-long building down to the last architectural detail, from the ornamental leaves and berries on its entrance columns to the quaint nineteenth-century marble fountain located in a far corner of the ground floor. It was rumored that the preserved building was to be turned into suites of offices, but immediately a counter-rumor arose, and now it was whispered that the consortium planned to revive the department store, to restore it to its former grandeur. Reports began to circulate that the consortium had been purchasing other department stores in other cities, that factories and warehouses belonging to the consortium were springing up in remote places. To all such talk we listened with a certain reserve, for we no longer knew whether we really desired the rebirth of our department store or longed only for its continuance in a perpetual brown twilight of decline.

  The opening was to take place in early spring. All that fall and winter we waited anxiousl
y, while behind the large display windows, covered by white sheets, we heard the sounds of workmen’s radios, of banging and sawing, of heavy loads scraping across floors; and high above, in the white skies of winter, the dark scaffolding seemed a complex, riddling work of destruction.

  We thought, without speaking of it, of long-drawn-out childhood waiting, of the waiting that gradually becomes infected with anxiety, with unhappiness, as the dreamed-of day, drawing closer and closer, grows heavy with the burden of impossible desires.

  And the day came, a day like all others, a cool bright mid-April morning. And we were struck by surprise: before our eyes, but as if secretly, a grand department store had sprung up, a new emporium that seemed always to have been there, obscured by the shadow of our faded hopes. The new store rose nineteen stories into the bright blue day. In the broad plate-glass windows of the ground floor and the brilliant, arched windows of the renovated granite facade, distorted reflections of red and brown office buildings seemed to tremble and shimmer.

  Despite the already opening doors it was impossible not to pause at the display windows, for the consortium, as if sensing our hesitation, had spared no expense in its effort to hold us there. One window showed a sandy beach with a tide line of seaweed and shells, and a strip of ocean with low waves breaking. The brilliantly realistic scene, with its bright blue sky and slow-drifting blue-shadowed clouds, its mannequin lifeguard on his white chair, its low waves breaking and scraping back, breaking and scraping back, its distant lighthouse no larger than a thimble, was inhabited in the foreground by three slender mannequin women sunning themselves in shiny silver bathing suits. Suddenly they sat up, revealing to spectators that they were real women pretending to be mannequins—and suddenly they lay down rigidly, making us wonder whether they were automated mannequins pretending to be real women; and the lifeguard refused to move, refused to give a sign; while seagulls that might have been real or might have been ingenious models strutted about in the sand.

  We smiled, we frowned thoughtfully, we granted the windows a certain originality, but at the same time we held back, we resisted the temptation to be captivated. After all, it wasn’t such shows we longed for, but something else entirely, something that carried us back to better times, when we still had hope, something to be found only on the inside. Is it a wonder we hesitated?

  Slowly, a little nervously, we made our way through the great arch of the renovated entranceway, toward a row of new glass doors. Panes of glass slid silently apart at our approach and ushered us toward an inner row of antique revolving doors, slow and dark, which reminded us of our childhood and of old black-and-white movies, and led into the store itself.

  We found ourselves in an immense Grand Court that rose to the height of three floors. A broad aisle lined with mannequins dressed in bustles and petticoats, top hats and greatcoats, led to the restored fountain with its six sculptures representing Honesty, Industry, Invention, Commerce, Thrift, and The Republic. And we were pleased, we were pleased: our fountain had never looked so splendid. But we were no fools, we understood perfectly that this evocation of a vanished golden age, an age in which none of us entirely believed, was a calculated appeal to something dubious in our natures. And yet we admired the shrewdness of the appeal, even as we refused to be taken in by it. We saw at once that the deliberately outmoded architectural style was mixed with aggressively modern touches, such as the glass elevators that rose along openwork steel columns, and the grand stairway, composed not of marble but of elegant curving escalators with transparent sides that led to a mezzanine where customers were already drinking coffee at white metal tables that gave a view of the Grand Court below. The bold clash of the old-fashioned and the ultramodern, each setting off the other, each designed to flatter us, to disarm our skepticism, was the most striking effect achieved by the consortium, whose deeper innovations and intentions revealed themselves gradually.

  With such thoughts we ascended the escalators and the glass elevators, we moved warily into the departments, felt our way farther into the depths of the store.

  We who have grown up with the old department stores know that one of their secret pleasures is the sudden, violent transitions between departments, the startling juxtapositions, as in the kind of museum where a room full of old fire engines opens into a hall lined with glass cases containing owls, herons, and sandpipers. In the new department store we saw the art of juxtaposition raised to bold and unexpected heights. With the exception of the Grand Court, which maintained the straight lines of the classical store, the departments of every floor had been designed to emerge suddenly and dramatically one from the other. So great an effort had been made by the interior designers to avoid clear vistas that many of the aisles were elaborately curved. From a shadowy, meandering pathway of highboys, glass-fronted bookcases, and rolltop desks with pigeonholes, there burst into view a bright unsettling place of long-legged mannequins with pink and green hair, wearing flashes of black satin and white lace. Here and there on glass counters, like mutilated corpses in a mad killer’s basement, rose the lower halves of female bodies, upside down with legs in the air—and as we made our way toward pairs of inverted legs in shiny black stockings studded with tiny green jewels, suddenly we found ourselves wandering among frostless refrigerators, three-tier dishwashers, microwave ovens with digital displays. A bored-looking mannequin with short black hair, who seemed to have strayed from her department, leaned against a refrigerator and revealed the latest brassiere from Italy, consisting of a single gold thread that crossed her breasts in a straight line and fastened with a heart-shaped clasp in back. Such transitions and confusions seemed to invite us to lose our way, despite the glass-covered maps posted everywhere; and we who wanted nothing better than to lose our way plunged deeper into the winding aisles, grateful for anything that increased our sense of the store’s abundance, that satisfied our secret longing for an endless multiplication of departments.

  This quality of surprise, this continual attempt to banish monotony and elude a sense of constriction, was also evident in one of the consortium’s more pleasing innovations. From time to time at the ends of turning aisles we came to broad, open areas where shoppers overcome by fatigue might rest before continuing on their way. Each area, designated as a plaza on the store maps, was designed in a distinct style. The floor of one such plaza was composed of real earth and grass. In the center rose a large oak tree with spreading branches, hung with Chinese lanterns, beneath which stood a scattering of slatted wooden benches. Another plaza was in the style of a foggy London street at night; clouds of yellowish fog were pumped in by a fog machine, obscuring the lampposts and the mannequin bobby with his polished billy club. And on an upper floor we discovered a Victorian parlor, where we sank down in the plump armchairs, under the gas lighting-fixtures, among the oval photographs, the whatnots, the marble statues.

  The artful plazas alone might have assured the success of the opening day, for already there were those among us who were eager to search all nineteen floors for plazas in period designs, but other innovations also attracted our attention. We were struck by the variety of accessory services and entertainments, located mainly on the four underground levels but also among the upper floors, such as the replicated shoeshine parlor, the old barber shop with its striped pole turning in a column of glass, the general store with its barrels of penny candy, the kinetoscope parlor on the eighth floor, the basement vaudeville theater with its four daily performances. We noted the many coffee shops, restaurants, and luncheonettes in scrupulously reproduced styles: the Pullman dining car, the eighteenth-century New England inn, the whaling ship, the pueblo village, the frontier saloon with swinging doors. And we discovered on each floor, as we emerged from a maze of meandering departments, sudden places the purpose of which appeared to be cultural or educational, although we sensed that their real intention was to interrupt the inevitable boredom of displayed merchandise with refreshing surprises—surprises that permitted the customer to return with renewe
d vigor to the strenuous adventure of buying. Thus the consortium had provided for our instruction a mannequin manufactory, with a bearded sculptor at work on a clay figure before a live model, in a setting of plaster casts, discarded hands and feet, and nearly finished fiberglass figures to which an assistant was adding glass eyes, wigs, and teeth; a meticulous replication of four galleries chosen from the Prado, the Uffizi, the Rijksmuseum, and the Hermitage, with expert reproductions of all the paintings, frames, and statues, and three uniformed guides who explained to small groups of shoppers the history and technique of each work of art; and a reproduced portion of Egyptian pyramid with steps leading down to two burial chambers and a mortuary temple.

  Perhaps because of the size of the new department store, the large number of plazas and cultural areas, the services and entertainments, the sheer assault on our nervous systems of nineteen floors and four basement levels of merchandise, we didn’t at first take special note of the new departments scattered throughout the store in what we took to be a spirit of whimsy, of exuberant invention. Such was the department of streams, pools, and waterfalls, located in a suddenly appearing alcove of the landscaping department, or, on the fourteenth floor, between men’s hats and notions, the gloomy department of caves and tunnels, where dim fluorescent bulbs set in the cave walls shed a purplish glow over the rock formations, and price tags hung from neatly labeled stalactites, flowstone, cave coral, twisting helictites. One of the more mysterious departments lay beyond a soft brown world of night tables, dimly glowing lamps, pulled-back bedspreads displaying flowery sheets, and four-poster beds with arched canopies and heavy curtains. At the end of a narrow path of bunkbeds filled with tigers and elephants, there suddenly appeared a high, whitish area that seemed to be under construction. Here and there on the floor stood broken marble columns and blocks of cracked stone, against one wall was a flight of crumbling steps leading nowhere, at a shiny wooden counter in one corner sat a man in a gray suit and maroon tie who seemed to await us.