by Ben Marcus
I’ve been dragging her along for the last fifty feet. Her eyes have stayed shut. “Just sleep, Leah. Continue to sleep. It’s all right. You’re just sleepwalking. Sleepwalking is as good as regular awake-walking as long as you’re going at the same pace with the person you’re walking with and using most to all your own energy, as you would when you walk while you’re awake. In ways it might be better than awake-walking, since you’re also probably getting some rest. And you need the rest. I do too, but one of us has to stay awake. For suppose we strayed off the road while both of us were sleepwalking and, instead of going in the right direction, we went back where we came from? Who wants that? I don’t. I’m sure you don’t. So sleep. You’re lucky. But when you wake up, mind if I fall asleep and sleepwalk with you but with you awake and leading the way? Because I can certainly use the sleep. I’m very tired, sleepy, and weak.”
We walk another thirty or so feet. It starts to rain. I set her down on the soaked ground right off the road. I sit beside her, cover her with my body. I lie on top of her. I say, “Let’s just go to sleep. I know it’s not that late, but there’s something about country air that makes me sleepier much earlier than I get in the city. Is it the same way with you? And it’s a nice house. Good thing we found shelter in time. I don’t much like the furniture—the style, I mean, for the furniture itself seems comfortable enough and clean. And the room’s warm, no leaks in the roof where we’d have to run around looking for pots and pans, and enough food here to keep us for a week. Also, the bed’s soft, sheets seem fresh and no more than a few days old, covers seem to be filled with real down. Let’s even try having that baby we said we’d try to have if things got better for us, and then we’ll go to sleep for the night. The weather outlook is very good. Clearing tonight, sunny and warm tomorrow, and the extended forecast calls for continued fair skies and low humidity through the weekend. We can even plant some flowers outside tomorrow and maybe occupy this house free for the next year. I doubt the owners or renters or whoever they are will come back for it that soon. And it’s a decent area, neighborhood seems pleasant and safe, neighbors seem like hardworking honest people, and I hear the shopping’s good, and a car’s been left outside with a tankful of gas in it and the keys on top of the dashboard. And lots of other things we’ve been dreaming of having the last few days. And here they all are, suddenly available to us. Good thing I brought along our credit cards, or rather, that you reminded me to bring them along. So, like to start now? Having a baby I mean. No matter how tired and sleepy I said I was, I always have energy for that. There, what heaven. The good things in life are free. Want to wash up now? You’d rather just go to sleep? Fine with me. I love cuddling up in bed with you. You’re so soft, you smell so nice, I love you more than I’ve loved any one thing. Any one person I mean. Oh, maybe as much as I loved my parents when I was a boy. Whatever, I love you more than I’ve loved any one person since I was a teen. So good night, all right? One last kiss? Now have sweet dreams.”
I get up, walk another hundred feet in the direction we were going, look back, see her lying by the road, run back, lie beside her, put my arms around her, say, “Dearest, you don’t know how good it is to be back. Been away I can’t say how long, but that’s the last time I’ll ever do that. I’ve seen lots of things, met lots of people, but found I can’t live without you, can’t leave without you, can’t live or leave or even love without you, or at least for very long, no matter how many interesting places I go to and people I meet. And since you don’t want to leave here, nothing I can do but stay here with you and call this home. It’s not a bad place, as I said. Better than most places, in fact, when you consider all it offers in just natural surroundings and comforts and that by my staying here the kids will have both parents to dote on them till they’re grown-up. So I’m staying unless you say it’s a better idea that I leave. You don’t want to answer that right now—that’s certainly your right. You want to hold off your decision about my decision to stay here, do so for as long as you like. But believe me, staying here with you and our kids in this home is really the only thing I want to do. Okay, no more yap. Just give me a little hug, because I need one.” And I squeeze her into me, press my cheek to hers, put the side of my lips on the side of hers, and shut my eyes. “Sleep. Boy, do I need to, too. But I said enough already for one night. Sleep tight.”
ALL AMERICAN
DIANE WILLIAMS
The woman, who is me—why pretend otherwise?—wants to love a man she cannot have. She thinks that is what she should do. She should love a man like that. He is inappropriate for some reason. He is married.
When she thinks of the man, she thinks force, and then whoever has the man already is her enemy—which is the man’s wife.
The woman makes sure the man falls in love with her. She has fatal charm. She can force herself to have it. Then she tells the man she cannot love him in return. She says, “You are in the camp with the enemy.”
Of course, the woman knew the man was sleeping with the enemy before she ever tried to love him, and the word enemy gives joy—the same as I get when the wrong kind of person calls me darling, as when my brother says, “Okay,” to me, “good-bye, darling,” before he hangs up the phone, after we have just made some kind of pact, which is what we should do, because I have to force myself to love the ones I am supposed to love, and then I have to force myself on the ones I am not supposed to love.
I got my first real glimpse of this kind of thing when I was still a girl trying to force myself on my sister. I didn’t know what I was doing until it was obvious. We were in the backseat of the family car. The car had just been pulled into the garage. The others got out, but we didn’t. I thought I was not done with something. Something was not undone yet—something like that—and I was trying to kiss my sister, and I was trying to hug my sister, and she must have thought it was inappropriate, like what did I think I was a man and she was a woman?
I must have been getting rough, because she was getting hysterical. I remember I was surprised. I remember knowing then that I was applying force and was getting away with it.
X NUMBER OF POSSIBILITIES
JOANNA SCOTT
Theodore von Grift lives a counterfeit life neither out of habit nor choice but out of self-defense. His tastes have been carefully acquired. Soft-boiled eggs, steak tartare, the fragrance of peonies, lawn tennis: the list has nothing genuine about it, since appreciation for Theodore von Grift is only an act. He abandoned his authentic self so long ago that he wouldn’t recognize him if they met on a street in downtown Baltimore. That he lives at number fifty-five Penrose Street in Baltimore, Maryland, is as unnatural as any other aspect of his life. His position as a bank officer, his wife and two children, his four-bedroom house—all contribute to the elaborate composition. He is not who he is and doesn’t try to resolve the paradox. Instead, he fills in the role he originated, each day adds new details, and by 1927 has grown so intricate, so complex, that the many people who early on recognized his personality as a mask have dwindled to one.
Theodore is being revealed, investigated, stripped, and examined by a mere child. He doesn’t even know the boy’s name, nor have they ever spoken. But every morning the boy is sitting on the porch steps of number sixty-three when Theodore walks by on his way to the trolley stop on Fulton Avenue. Sixty-three is the most dilapidated house on the block, the shingles sloughing, the shutters hanging crookedly, and ordinarily Theodore would have ignored these neighbors. But there is something about the way the boy looks up from the scab on his knee and stares: a wise, unnerving stare, as though he can see beneath Theodore’s clothes. Theodore has spent half his lifetime protecting himself from observation, has perfected impenetrability and is to acquaintances and family what lead is to the X-ray. And now, in his forty-ninth year, he has met his match in an unkempt little boy.
He could easily take a roundabout route and avoid the child. But the challenge is too compelling: he walks by number sixty-three in order to test himself, an
d though he continues to fail the test, he has not given in to discouragement. If one sheet of lead doesn’t shield him from those prying eyes, he will try two; if two don’t suffice, he will try platinum. Eventually he will be to the child what he is to everyone else—only surface—and the boy will forget what he has seen. Young children have short, selective memories. There will be enough distractions in his life, and Theodore von Grift will fade with most of the boy’s past, just as he has faded from himself.
“I should remember,” Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, inventor of the X-ray, once wrote to a friend, “where there is much light there is also much shadow.” Theodore’s adult life remains clear in his memory, but the years of his childhood are hidden in shadow. It is not as if he died on or around his eighteenth birthday. The figurative expression is nearly literal in his case, a case notable enough to be written up in Scientific American, earning him invitations to lecture at two German universities. But because the fame of the case was inspired by the new Röntgen rays rather than by his remarkable recovery, and, more important, because he had to reconstruct his personality from scratch, he had declined the invitations, booked a passage to the United States, and under a pseudonym (now his permanent name, thirty-one years later) began life over again.
He remembers the first days of adulthood only through a few stark impressions: the face of an old woman, her crooked teeth which looked as soft as hot tallow. A man, presumably his doctor, breathing stale tobacco as he peered into his ear. And nuns, dozens of nuns bustling about the room—like gray rats, Theodore had thought as he sleepily watched them from his bed.
He had been living in Munich; where he’d come from he didn’t know. The doctor could tell him only this: that he’d been found lying in a park, his hair matted with blood, his fingers still tangled around the trigger of a pistol. No identification was found. He’d been transported to a nearby hospital. A surgeon neatly sutured the wound after deciding that the bullet was too deeply embedded to be removed, and Theodore remained an invalid at the hospital for five months.
The hospital nuns called him Anton because he often murmured the name in his sleep. They grew fond of him, intrigued, perhaps, by his amnesia, and when he was strong enough to leave, they gave him a wallet full of money to maintain him until he could find work. They offered to love him like a son if he couldn’t locate his own parents, told him to consider the hospital his permanent home. But life on the busy city streets absorbed him as soon as he walked out into daylight, and he left the hospital behind forever.
While he had been convalescing, the police had made inquiries and advertised in newspapers for any information concerning the young man known as Anton, age approximately eighteen. But no one had come forward. He must have been a stranger in Munich, without friends or relatives in the city. And Theodore, then Anton, found himself increasingly grateful for the mystery of his past. Whatever he’d been in his previous life, he’d been driven to suicide. So it was best to forget that life, along with the nuns, the hospital, the bullet in his head. The German language and an impressive mathematical ability were the only souvenirs from his youth. At the age of eighteen (approximately), he had thirty crowns to his name, whatever name he chose. Even as he’d boarded a train for Hamburg the day he was released from the hospital, he gave himself a new name, Hermann, as though this were enough to dismiss the former self entirely, the self hidden just beyond the boundary of his awareness.
Can the child sitting on the steps of number sixty-three Penrose Street in Baltimore see what Theodore can’t see? The secrets of his past, which are to Theodore no more than countless possibilities? He is like a pocket watch and the boy does what most children will do if given the chance. He smashes the watch so he can investigate its parts. Smashes Theodore every time he walks by. Twirls his dirty little forefinger in his cowlick and stares at Theodore with smug innocence, which makes the man, by contrast, guilty.
What have I done? Theodore has been wondering since the boy first stationed himself on the steps last August. His first memory is of the old woman’s teeth. Before that, his recollections are all speculative. He imagines himself sprawled on the ground, spread-eagle, blood crusted on his brow. Is this what the little boy sees? Or worse? And what came before? What crime did Theodore commit that drove him to the crime of suicide?
Try this, he tells himself repeatedly. Make your mind blank. White. Beyond the oranges and reds of Baltimore row houses he sees white walls, four windowless walls as white as paper. Anton, Hermann, Theodore. Anton’s eyes were covered with white bandages. Hermann was surrounded by whitewashed walls. Theodore’s mind is nearly blank, dominated by these memories of blankness, and what he wants is identical to what he wanted: to escape. His was a wild animal’s rage. As Hermann he had leaped at a man, gripped his throat, throttled him, all the while blinded by the intensity of white. This is what I will do to you, boy, Theodore von Grift thinks, flexing his fingers as he walks on. Don’t touch me. They called me mad once. Come too close and you won’t live to tell what happened.
It is the same sequence every morning, and by the time Theodore has reached State Street, his face shines with perspiration, his chest heaves, the design of his life has begun to unravel.
In truth, he was never mad, or at least no more mad than a man strung on the rack. He had a bullet in his head, and Theodore—rather, Hermann—believed that if the bullet were removed he would regain control over himself. But he was living in Hamburg by then, and he couldn’t recall the name of the hospital where he’d been treated. He could only point to the side of his head and insist repeatedly, “Here, I shot myself here.” The Hamburg doctors, seeing no sign of a scar, labeled him insane.
The fault was his. Without references or personal history—before he’d invented a story for himself—he’d been unable to find a job, so in the beginning he’d done nothing but wander the streets, spending his money on coffee, bread, and rent. Soon the headaches began, and after three months, when the pain grew too intense to bear, he’d gone to a doctor and asked him to remove the bullet. The doctor asked for a detailed account, so Theodore explained how at the age of eighteen he had tried to kill himself.
It was in the doctor’s office where Theodore first lost control. In the middle of his visit, without provocation, he suddenly seized the doctor by his neck, nearly strangling him to death. He attacked the policemen who came to carry him off to jail. He fought with the attendants transporting him to the asylum. He even sprang at a nurse, a young woman who, with astonishing strength, subdued him with a punch that split his lower lip. Not until the director informed him that he’d been committed to the Hamburg asylum did he realize what he’d done.
I have a bullet embedded in my head. I am not mad; the bullet makes me crazy, blinds me, all I can see is the white light of my pain. I want to stop the pain, nothing else. Don’t blame me—blame the bullet in my head. You think these are a lunatic’s ravings. Cut me open, see for yourself. I don’t remember who I was, how I survived. I know I shot myself. I can’t explain why there is no scar. The nuns, ask the nuns. I don’t remember where they were, but they must be somewhere still. Let me out and I’ll find them. They’ll assure you that I’m speaking the truth. My name is Hermann Glasser. I give you my permission to operate. I implore you. Go ahead—for curiosity’s sake, then, if for no other reason. I want to live a normal life, work hard all week and on Sundays shoot woodcocks from the window of a little bird-branch hut. But I cannot acquire a hunting license as long as I am legally insane. Help me.
For ten years he had raged, begged, wept, but the doctors remained unmoved. In their informed opinion everything he said was governed by the skewed logic of his main delusion: the patient named Hermann believed he had a bullet in his head. After extensive examination the doctors proclaimed him incurable, and he became just another inmate of the asylum, another child-man to hide from his easily disgusted fellow Germans.
Against all odds he had survived, emerged from the asylum at the age of twenty-nine—appro
ximately—not only sane but famous enough to share a page in Scientific American with an English swallow. The swallow’s feat was to fly from London to its nest on a Shropshire farm at a speed of two miles per minute. Theodore’s feat was to be among the first to demonstrate the usefulness of the recently discovered X-ray.
“A Hamburg young man has just had his sanity proved by the Röntgen rays. He declared ten years ago that he had a bullet in his head which he had fired into it in trying to commit suicide. He complained of pain, and as he attacked his keepers and the doctors could find no trace of the wound, was locked up as a dangerous lunatic. The Röntgen rays have now shown the exact place of the bullet.” Scientific American, November 7, 1896.