“We?” his son asked him.
“Your mother and I. We know you’re working very hard on these pieces, and we would like to hear some of them. One at least.”
The boy looked up at him with those limpid blue eyes, and then looked away, up into a corner of the studio ceiling, above the top shelf of the storage unit. He answered then without looking at his father. “Mother is not at all interested or she would have asked me by now, but if you would like to hear some I think I could start you off with the songs I was doing last year. Or would you like to hear the stuff I’m doing now?”
His father would be pleased to hear the songs from last year, and the boy walked over to the storage unit, picked out a boxed tape reel and handed it to him without a word. When he listened to them later, Mr. Mortimer was struck first of all by the fact that these songs had no words, and then by the dirge-like, lugubrious heaviness of the “music,” which was made up of sounds only some of which he recognized, like the piano. He had threaded the tape and turned on the machine with some anxiety, and was relieved that the songs, though harsh and in some places discordant and overall almost unbearably sad, were still immediately recognizable as music. He had been anxious as he pressed the playback button because, when his son had handed him the tape, Mr. Mortimer had said, “Thank you, but I would also like to hear the music you are writing now, if I could,” and the boy had wordlessly rewound the tape and then, with his hand on the control panel, had looked at him for the first time since being asked about his music.
“This switches the sound,” he explained, turning a knob, “from the headphones to the speakers,” and he pointed up to the enormous speakers up near the ceiling. Then, with his hand on the play button, he gave his father a long, steady look that was the equivalent of a shrug of the shoulders, and pressed the button. Immediately Mr. Mortimer felt his flesh creep. Something was skittering around on a series of taut strings, like mice over dead leaves. It was a pattern that made a texture that covered the walls and floor and ceiling of the room this music made, a corridor that shot straight as an arrow and high-ceilinged as a church into some darkness out of which a groan, as if the whole house were in pain, reached out to him a hand whose fingers clutched once and then surrendered and fell back. The dimness was punctuated regularly by flashes of light that illuminated nothing. And then the animals—or what sounded like animals—began to scream. Nothing but death could have seized them and torn such screams from them. He stood up. His son turned off the tape. “Thank you,” Mr. Mortimer said. Outside the door of the studio, he stood a moment in reflection. This had been a mistake. When he had looked into his son’s eyes that afternoon four years before, he had had something like a vision. He saw the boy from behind, walking straight and upright, with his hands in his pockets, sweeping his head from side to side across the path and the woods on either side of it. You could not see the end of that path, which dissolved in a green and yellow and brown dimness. Since he had entered the woods for the first time that day, he had assumed that the room or the house of his son’s life included him, and he had been disturbed by the studio and the work his son did there, work that he never heard. It occurred to him that nobody else ever heard these works either, but that was no comfort at all since that only numbered him among the “nobody else.” Even after he had heard the work, he still felt as if he were standing outside the studio watching his son produce “music” that would never reach him. Evidently there were woods within woods, rooms within the rooms, whose doors were always open a crack but in which he would never stand.
The business with the trains began the following week, when he and his son had gone into town on a shopping errand. As they walked past the hardware store, a movement in the window caught his eye, and he stopped to look for a moment at the model-train setup behind the glass where a twelve-car train moved slowly behind an HO-scale locomotive around an artificial landscape that included tunnels, lakes, a water tower and a depot. How pathetic, he thought at first, and then he glanced down at the top of his son’s head. The boy was also looking into the window. It was hot. He looked again at the train. Inside the store a small group of boys who appeared to be around nine or ten years old were standing, watching the train move while they moved their mouths. From time to time one of them would point to something in the landscape.
“Would you like one of those?” Mr. Mortimer asked.
The boy looked into the window for a long time, and then up at his father. “Yes,” he said.
When they got home and began, slowly and methodically, to assemble the train set on the table in the dining room, Mrs. Mortimer asked him if he had remembered the roast. “No,” he said, and got up from the table to go back to town to the butcher shop. His son went with him. In the car, as they drove along in silence, the boy said, “Mother will not like the train to be set up in the dining room.” It was one of the few times Mr. Mortimer could remember his son initiating a conversation. He was right.
“We can set it up in the attic,” the boy continued.
“Attic?” They were driving past the little ballpark just outside the town limits.
“In the back of the closet in my room there is a door that leads up to an attic room. It has no windows. It’s perfectly empty.”
Mr. Mortimer was surprised to hear that in the house he had been living in all these years there was a room he had known nothing about. It was another bit of information to learn, to digest. These bits of information were always “there,” and from time to time they came into focus, made themselves known to you in one way or another. What made this one more interesting was the fact that it came from his son, who obviously had known about it all along and had not thought it important enough to mention. And it had not been, up till now, worth mentioning. What could be more empty than an empty room? But now that it existed for him it began to be charged, filled with possibilities.
It was necessary to set up some tables in the attic room, but Mr. Mortimer was glad for the room and for the trains and the landscape that he and the boy began to assemble. He was glad for the boy—even though he himself, neither as a child nor now, had ever had the slightest interest in trains or in model railroading—who gravely opened each box containing more cars or track or locomotives or transformers or some new piece of the landscape, a mountain or a tree, a billboard. The boy now began to read books on railroads and models, and as the layout expanded in size it increased also in its authenticity, its faithfulness to detail. Mr. Mortimer never, after that first question as they stood outside the hardware store, made any suggestions or interfered in any way with his son’s conception of the world that was taking form in the room. He only listened, and either bought the equipment or, when his son requested, helped in its manufacture or assembly. It was a very small sacrifice to make for the happiness of his somewhat strange son.
Later, David learned from an exchange of letters between Mrs. Mortimer and her mother that the boy had never had the slightest interest in model railroading, and had begun the layout and continued to expand and develop it, almost to the day of his death, because he knew it made his father feel good to think he was contributing in this way to his son’s happiness. The studio was his own world, which excluded the father even when he was in it, even when he was in the room the music made within that room, so the attic was a small recompense, a world that included everything, including even his father. So the boy continued to think up new expansions and refinements of the model-railroad world in the attic, things the father would think he found fascinating, things they could do or make or watch together, soberly requesting his father’s opinion or advice, even to the wrecks.
After they had been expanding the train layout for a couple of years, the boy began staging elaborately planned collisions of the trains, at first involving only freight and tanker cars, but later including passenger trains like the silver Amtrak replica twenty cars long. He even designed and put together an engine that came apart in modules so that it could be “destroyed” in a crash
and then reassembled. His father, who always watched the performance of the trains without any expression whatever, observed these crashes in the same way. Eventually, the boy stopped staging them, until François began coming up to the attic room. Mr. Mortimer had told his wife about the wrecks, which were accompanied by all the appropriate sound effects, including the screams of the victims. They disturbed him, he said, and when she relayed this to the boy he said, “I thought so. Adult people are apt to be disturbed by representations of death.”
His mother looked at him.
“Lots of beautiful things,” he went on, “are filled with pain and darkness. This house, next door.”
“This house?” she asked.
The boy pointed to the window, where four or five bees were buzzing and colliding with the glass, killing themselves as they tried to return to the world of moving dark green on the other side. The windowsill and the floor under it were littered with the bodies of other bees.
“Death doesn’t disturb you?” she asked as he got up from the table and walked to the fridge.
“No,” he said, pouring himself a glass of milk.
François had been wrong, or at least partly wrong, David learned now, about the living room in the woods. It was Mr. Mortimer’s son who had begun it. He had seen some young men from the college ceremoniously carrying an old couch through the woods. They told him they were wanting to give it a decent burial, and could he direct them to the refuse dump. “They were staggering around a little and their speech was slurred,” he told his father as he led him through the woods to the clearing where the couch had been installed. “I told them they could bury the couch nearer than the dump, and better too, because even in death it would continue to live and serve. I told them about the clearing, but they insisted on the burial part. Then I told them we could have the burial there in the clearing. I promised to recite the ceremony—the Catholic one, since it has the most Latin. I had to teach them the responses, but it all went O.K.”
Mr. Mortimer looked now at the couch. It had once been a rich crimson, and regal in size, sumptuous. It had probably come from a hotel, but then there were a number of families in this area with homes large enough for a couch this size. Most of its nap was gone and it had faded unevenly over the years, till now it was the no color of burgundy wine into which someone had poured coffee with cream. Some wealthy family had lived their life in the room with this sofa, sitting on it while the daughter’s fiance had stood asking for their permission. Sitting there, on that corner of it, while upstairs the grandmother with the skin cancer breathed furtively and that look came into her eyes as she understood and refused to understand simultaneously and her last breath gargled in her throat. From there the couch ended up somehow in the dorm room of some students at the college, who bequeathed it from class to class. It sat now against the far “wall” of the clearing, facing the path, white cotton batting spilling from its various wounds.
Mr. Mortimer stood there intrigued. Something happened to the space of the clearing just because the sofa was there. The “door” of this room was standing wide open. He could imagine an afghan draped over the back of the couch. He could imagine the students from the college coming here to sit on it with their feet up on a coffee table. They had a six-pack of beer and from time to time in their loud conversation they gestured, forgetting the beer can in that hand and spilling a little on themselves and on the couch too, which they wiped up with a couple of swipes of an open palm. He said, “It needs a coffee table.”
They found a coffee table at a yard sale in Tivoli, and the easy chair and floor lamp and a heavily framed picture and an Oriental rug at the Salvation Army Thrift Store in Poughkeepsie. Placed there in the clearing, the room they made in the woods was a room in their life. Mr. Mortimer did not any longer feel the need to look into the dedications and acknowledgments in the books near his carrel in the basement of the library. He thought of keeping a large paper shopping bag in his office at the college. He would wait till Professor Hartpence stepped out of his room, leaving the door open as he always did. He would quickly and confidently move (silently) down the hall, as if he had every right to be there, and walk through the door calling, “Neal?” in a conversational tone. Then swiftly he would strip the afghan from the back of the couch, fold it neatly while his heart pounded “like a trip-hammer” in his chest and stuff it into the shopping bag which he now pulled out from under his sweater and unfolded.
But that was crazy. He had not felt a desire as passionate as that since he was courting Allison. It was to guard against just such vagaries that the structure of civilization had been erected, the city of man. That evening he asked his wife, “Have you ever thought of knitting?”
She had just sat down in front of the mirror of her dressing table and reached down to put a box of Tampax into the drawer. “Knitting what?” she asked.
Now as Mr. Mortimer walked through the woods, he could hear the sounds of an animal chewing on something hard and crunchy, like a root or a nut. The sound of it was tinny and amplified many times. The chewing was surrounded by a skittering noise, a panicky breaking or chipping of small bits of glass. These were punctuated by groans and a mumbling of Latin, and weaving through them all was a piercing, throbbing electronic jangle. As he came up to the living room, he saw his son seated on that once-red couch, the tape machine beside him. The boy touched the machine, instantly snapping the woods back into silence. “Hello, Dad, would you like to play with the train?” But Mr. Mortimer had brought a book and wanted only to sit in the easy chair and read. His son put on his headphones. They often did this now.
It was about this time that the boy began bringing books home from the library. When his father asked him about this, he said, “With most books you just read them and you’re done with them. You can use the information or you can’t. But with poetry it’s different. It isn’t like something that you use up but more like a house you live in.” The house he was living in now was Emily Dickinson’s.
“Why Emily Dickinson?” his father asked. They had stopped to look down into the cellar of the Barstow vault and were now walking past the tennis courts, empty in the heat of the middle of the day. A couple in tennis clothes were sitting on the grass under the shade of some trees on the far side of the courts, which lay now, idle and silent, a tall open cage laid out in red and green, the new white lines crisply defining the areas.
“She knew,” the hoy said, “that death is real: ‘impossible to feign.’ All the rules, all those lines and fences, they’re all constructed. All made up—to keep death out. And it’s here already, it was here all along. The way your mother is in the house all along, the one thing you know for sure is that she was there before you.” He started to walk again and Mr. Mortimer followed. A couple in jogging outfits huffed past them.
“When I’m out in the living room next door,” the boy said, “or upstairs in the train room or something, and I hear Mother calling me in, I don’t want to go, even though I know I should. Being next door is neat, and being in the house is neat too. But saying ‘No’ is maybe the sweetest of all.”
“Why is that?”
“I don’t know. The ‘No’ is also an ‘I know,’ I guess. You know it doesn’t really mean what it says. It’s just a delay, a prolonging, delaying what we long for.”
They went on walking for a while, and then Mr. Mortimer asked, “Would you like to try writing poetry?”
“Yes,” he said after a pause. “I’ve been writing some.” He looked up at his father. “Would you like to read some of it?”
Mr. Mortimer remembered the “music” he had heard down in the boy’s studio. “Yes,” he said finally.
When they got home, the boy went to his room and came back with the black spring binder, which he presented to his father.
“These are the LEDs,” he said.
“What are LEDs?”
“Light-emitting diodes.”
Mr. Mortimer did not understand why his son would enjoy using ter
ms that the boy knew were unknown to him. When the boy left the room, his father opened the binder to the title page, which read “Die Odes.” Well, he thought, to the best of his knowledge the boy had never taken typing lessons. He read the first three poems as if he had been handed a text in a language he had never learned. After the third poem he closed the book and looked at the wall.
1.
Now will I die, soon. So held again to be
All so unlucky? To die, to become the night, the sheen
Of the “unlucky” shining for me alone.
The sun shines all around, meaning—?
You must not die in the night, shrunken back
To the dirt, they say. You must see in yourself the light,
Sunken in the lamp though it be, lost in the mine.
Hail, they say, afraid of the light I see in the world.
2.
Now I see why you warned me so, dark flames,
Spraying me with your magic blaze,
O August! O August night!
Glad sham, the volume of your blaze,
The danger of your glance, the mighty shame.
I went to the dock in the night, wild neighbor in whom I would go swimming,
Weaving and blending myself in your quick.
That such stars presided over these rites, homely care,
The thin door that wanted all the stars stemmed in its own tide.
I will tell how I heard you say:
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