Voices in the Night

by Steven Millhauser

  A few days later, in another part of town, Thomas Dombek, a college junior home for the summer, moved onto the roof of his parents’ house two blocks from the beach. Here and there a few more imitators appeared—it seemed inevitable. But we weren’t prepared for the sudden rush to the roof that now took place, in the middle of July. You could see them in every neighborhood, carrying long boards up ladders that leaned against the gutters. Soon we could see shelters springing from rooftops like the TV antennas we remembered from childhood. It was as if the houses of our town were no longer large enough to contain our desires. From our front porches, from folding chairs in our backyards, we watched the odd structures rising on roof crests. The art was to fasten a base over two slopes of roof and continue with walls or a protective rail. All over town you could hear a great ringing of hammers. At lunchtime, workmen in T-shirts sat on sunny roofs, tipping their heads back to drink from bottles of soda that caught the sun. Children looked up, shading their eyes.

  Of course not everyone could follow the difficult example of David Lindquist. Most people simply flung themselves into the new fashion for recreational roof-dwelling without a thought of permanent residence. For them, a roof-house was a form of elevated porch. In the hot nights of July you could see them sleeping up there, under the stars.

  But now and then a different kind of roof-dweller emerged. Highly disciplined, solitary and fervid, the lonely ones would sit motionless for long hours at a time, wrapped in silence. Sometimes one would rise slowly and address the streets. The roof-dweller would speak of the Way—by which was meant the way out of unhappiness and despair, the way into spiritual peace. People would gather in the street below, listen for a while, and pass on. One of these lay preachers, a tall woman named Verna Coombs, who wore overalls and work boots and a red bandanna, called herself a Transcensionist and quickly attracted followers. The Transcensionists rejected the world below, which was the realm of heaviness and dissatisfaction, and embraced the upper world, the true world beyond appearances.

  At times it seemed to us that another place, an unknown place, was trying to emerge from within our town. It burrowed in the earth below our cellars, rose up silently in the corners of living rooms, trembled in the air above our rooftops.

  I would come upon it sometimes, that other place. Turning a corner onto a familiar street, with its front porches and Norway maples, its yellow hydrant and brown telephone poles, I would feel a strangeness. The sunlight seemed not to strike the house sides directly but to fall in between. Shadows shifted, objects seemed liberated from the constrictions of light and were on the verge of becoming themselves, the sidewalks shook silently, everything glittered and trembled, while up above, the tight-stretched blue sky was being pulled from both sides until it was about to rip down the middle—then it all stopped, the street settled down, the sidewalks returned to their stillness, and I walked past white-painted downspouts with vertical grooves that stood out clearly, past dandelions thick with petals that, as I glanced at them, became sharp as knife blades.

  Was it in the last weeks of July that we began to notice a change in the children? We knew of course that they’d already been affected in small ways by the events breaking out all around them. How could they have escaped untouched? But we had been preoccupied with rumor and speculation, we had grown a little careless, we’d failed to give the children our full attention. It was the Game that brought them back into our awareness. You would see them in their yards, walking slowly, too slowly, and suddenly stepping around something that seemed to be in their way. Sometimes they held out their arms as if they were walking in the dark, though the sun shone down from a cloudless sky and their shadows stood out sharply against the cut grass. Gradually we learned the nature of the Game. The children were summoning up imaginary places and walking around in them for hours at a time. The idea was to stay longer and longer there, to stay there forever. Backyards containing a swing set and a length of hose became dense forests teeming with dwarves and wolves. When the children opened the doors of their rooms, they entered the holds of sunken ships, towers with winding stairways, hollow mountains where white animals drank from black streams.

  At dinner the children sat quietly, with dreamy stares. If parents interrupted their trances by hurling questions at them, they answered carefully, politely, with an air of faint distress.

  One case that drew some attention was that of little Julie Goudreau. She was seven years old. One afternoon in August she was found sitting on the grass in the middle of her next-door neighbor’s backyard. When Mrs. Waters came out to see what was the matter, Julie told her that she was lost and could never find her way home. “But you live right over there, dear,” said Mrs. Waters, pointing at the next yard, separated from her own by a driveway and three azalea bushes. Julie turned her head to look in the direction toward which Mrs. Waters had pointed. What struck Catherine Waters was the expression on Julie’s face—she stared at her own yard with a little puzzled frown of concentration, as if she were gazing at something she’d never seen before. Then she turned back and looked down at her hand lying in the grass. Mrs. Waters bent over to help her up. At that moment, Julie turned to look at her. It was a look of such rage that Mrs. Waters stepped back. “I hate you,” Julie said, quietly and distinctly. She lowered her eyes and sat stubbornly there, refusing to say another word, until her mother came and dragged her home.

  Even as we worried about our children, and blamed ourselves for neglecting them under the pressure of our own distractions, we found ourselves drawn to those trancelike stares, those dreamy gazes, and wondered what it would be like to burst open our days with inner voyages.

  It may be that I’ve given a misleading impression. I don’t mean things were only that way. Even in the early days of the manifestations, when it seemed that every living room was about to erupt with mysterious life, we drove our cars to work, we sat down to dinner, we pushed our shopping carts along the frozen food aisles. On tree-shaded street corners, joggers with headbands ran in place, waiting for a car to turn. The sound of chain saws and wood chippers filled the suburban air. On a hot, shady porch, in the languor of a midsummer afternoon, a high school girl in jean cutoffs and a bikini top sipped lemonade from a tall straw, while she twirled a loop of reddish brown hair around and around and around her finger.

  Meanwhile, as if they’d been watching the children from behind the edges of closed blinds, the old people of our town began to emerge from their hiding places. We saw them late at night, gathered on dark front porches, silently rocking. They seemed to be waiting for something that was about to happen. Sometimes we would catch sight of them moving very slowly across our backyards, taking small steps, their heads bent toward the ground, the rubber tips of their canes and walkers pressing into the grass. The paper reported that one night at two in the morning four “oldsters,” ranging in age from eighty-six to ninety-three, made their way down the beach to the water’s edge, where they were discovered by a policeman. They were staring out at the water. The tide was coming in, and the low waves had already covered their shoes and ankles by the time the officer found them.

  Sometimes we had the feeling that at any moment, around any corner, suddenly the summer would reveal its secret, and a peace, like soothing rain, would descend on us.

  By the middle of August we felt the exhaustion of adventures that had never taken us far enough. At the same time we were inflamed by a kind of sharp, overripe alertness to possibilities untried. In the languor and stillness of perfect afternoons, we could already feel the last days of summer, coming toward us with their burden of regret. What had we done, really? What had we ever done? There was a sense that it all should have led to something, a sense that a necessary culmination had somehow failed to come about. And always the days passed, like riddles we would never solve.

  It was one of those rich late days of August when the air seemed to quiver with light and heat, so that you felt you were looking at things through a faint haze, though the sky was br
illiantly clear. Was it the haze of our accumulated desires? For in the last weeks of summer our longings had grown stronger and more demanding, unappeased by our tunnels and roof-dwellings, our gatherings and investigations, which seemed to us now, when we thought back on them, feeble emblems of whatever it was that eluded us. The day was Saturday—the last one of August. It felt like the last Saturday of the year, the last Saturday of all time. As we moved through the morning and afternoon, filled with vague unrest, we were scarcely present, in our backyards and on our front porches, at our picnic tables and at the beach, we were straining in other directions, we were elsewhere.

  The change began around dusk. We had come home, most of us, from wherever the day had taken us. We’d finished dinner, we were waiting for the rest of the day to come about—waiting, in the peculiar way of that summer, for something worthy of our desires. The sun had slipped out of sight, though the tops of telephone poles and high trees were still touched by light. The sky was pale blue. Here and there, a lamp went on in a window. It was the time of day when it was really two times of day—above, the still-bright sky; below, the beginnings of night. It was as if the day had paused for a moment, unable to make up its mind. And we, in our various places, were probably not paying close attention, had perhaps fallen into a muse, an inner pause of our own. Someone must have been the first: the hand reaching idly out and rippling through the lamp table, drifting through the lamp. It happened in street after street: the shoulder moving through the bathroom door, the hand floating through the armchair, dropping through the porch rail. Some reported a faint resistance, like the sensation of passing a hand through cool water, or of pushing through cobwebs. Others felt nothing at all. Some claimed to hear, rising from the houses of our town, a communal gasp or sigh. In the wonder of that moment, we understood that our summer had risen to meet us.

  Warily, joyfully, we moved through our houses with arms held wide, passing through objects that no longer resisted us. We entered the streets, where people wandered as if under a spell. Children, crazed with laughter, ran back and forth through the trunks of maples. We walked through hedges and white picket fences, stepped through the sides of porches, passed through the walls of houses into other backyards. Through swing sets and birdbaths we strolled along. We made our way over to Main Street, where streetlights glowed in the pale sky, and crowds tense with awe moved through store windows. Someone pointed up: a sparrow, trying to land on the crossbar of a telephone pole, passed through and began beating its wings fiercely before sweeping back up into the sky.

  Who can say how long it lasted? We plunged into that dusk as if we’d always known what lay under the skin of the world. We reveled in dissolution. Under the darkening sky we wandered through our town like children after a first snow.

  Just before nightfall, when there was still a little light left in the sky, we became aware of a slight thickening. As we stepped through things, we could feel a satiny tickle. Someone cried out: he had banged his knee against the side of a store. Things hardened part by part. Here and there, a hand was caught in wood or stone.

  Later, when we tried to understand it all, when we tried to give it a meaning, some said that maybe, at a certain moment, around the beginning of dusk, everyone in our town had been dreaming of something else. The town, deprived of our attention, had begun to tremble and waver, to grow insubstantial. Others, more skeptical, proposed that none of it ever happened, that a great delirium had struck our town, like an outbreak of the flu. Still others argued that we had been given a revelation but hadn’t known what to do with it. Our ignorance had ushered in the reign of hardness.

  Whatever may have happened that day, we woke the next morning as if we’d slept for a month. Sunlight streamed into our rooms. We reached out and touched the edges of things. In our kitchens, chairs stood out sharply, as if they’d sprung up from the floor. We felt in our hands the weight of spoons, felt against our fingers the rims of cereal bowls. We pushed against doors, felt on the soles of our feet the thrust of doormats and front steps. Outside, we ran our fingers along bush branches and hedge branches, we squeezed hoses and steering wheels, the rubber grips of lawn mowers. On Main Street we grasped the handles of glass doors, we picked up objects that tugged back, filled shopping bags that pulled against our palms. All day we felt the push of sidewalks, the surge of grass. All day we felt the weight of sunlight settling on our arms. All day we felt, grazing our skin, the blue of the sky, the edges of shade. Sometimes we recalled that other summer, but already it was a story we would tell, in warm living rooms in winter, about the time we wandered through the streets at dusk with our arms held wide, a long time ago, in some other life.

  THIRTEEN WIVES

  I have thirteen wives. We all live together in a sprawling Queen Anne house with half a dozen gables, two round towers, and a wraparound porch, not far from the center of town. Each of my wives has her own room, as I have mine, but we gather for dinner every evening in the high dining room, at the long table under the old chandelier with its pink glass shades. Later, in the front room, we play rummy or pinochle in small groups, or sit talking in faded armchairs and couches. My wives get along very well with one another, though their relation to me is more complex. People sometimes ask, “Why thirteen wives?” “Oh,” I always say, putting on my brightest smile, “you can’t have too much of a good thing!” In truth, the answer is less simple than that, though the precise nature of the answer remains elusive even to me. What’s clear is that I love my wives, each alone and all together, and can’t imagine a life without all of them. Even though I married my wives one after the other, over a period of nine years, I never did so with the thought that I was replacing one wife with a better one, or abolishing my former wives by starting over. Never have I considered myself to be a man with thirteen marriages but rather a man with a single marriage, composed of thirteen wives. Whether this solution to the difficult problem of marriage is one that will prove useful to others, or whether my approach will add nothing to the sum of human knowledge, is not for me to say. I say only that, speaking strictly for myself, there could have been no other way.

  Here, then, are my wives.

  1

  Absolute equals, heart-sharers, partners in love—that’s how we think of each other, my first wife and I. If, on a Sunday morning, I wake up late to find she’s made me a plate of big blueberry pancakes, just the way I liked them as a boy, with a square of butter melting its way in, then the next Sunday I’ll serve her a two-egg omelet with green peppers and chopped onions, exactly the kind she remembers from summers at the cabin on the island when she was a girl. I remind her of her appointment with the hairdresser for Tuesday at one, she makes sure I don’t miss my dentist’s appointment on Thursday at four; I drive with her to her mother’s house in Vermont on the third weekend in July, she comes with me to my father’s house on the Cape for the second week of August; I praise the trim lines of her new yellow sundress, she’s pleased by the crisp look of my new light-weave button-down. These arrangements are perhaps known to every marriage, but ours has developed more intimate refinements. If my first wife catches her hand in a door, I howl with sudden pain; when I’m thirsty, she gulps down a glass of iced limeade; if I knock into a table edge, a purple bruise shows on her leg; if she trips on the edge of the rug, I fall to the floor. One evening I thought of the answer to a crossword clue we’d both been stuck on the day before; when I entered her room, I found her sitting up in bed, folded newspaper in hand, filling in the answer with a yellow No. 2 pencil. Another time, when things weren’t going well with me, I woke in the night and feared she might be suicidally depressed; when I rushed into the hall, I nearly collided with her, hurrying toward me with arms held wide and a look of rescue in her eyes. Sometimes, it’s true, I grow bored, deeply bored, with our system of finely measured equivalences. Then I long for an imbalance, a sharp exception, a fierce eruption. Unhappy that I’ve had such thoughts, and uncertain what to do, I seek out the one person who’s sure to under
stand; when I seize her arms and look into her eyes, I see the same melancholy, the same longing for something unknown; and as I burst into a dark, uneasy laugh, I hear, all over the room, like the cries of many animals, the sound of her own troubling laughter.

  2

  When I am feeling hopeless about my life, when my hands hang from my sleeves like dead men dangling, when, catching sight of myself in a plate-glass window, I turn violently away, but not before I’ve seen myself turn violently away, then I know it’s time for me to be in the company of my second wife, who knows how to comfort me. Even as I arrive at the front door, holding my leather laptop case in one hand and reaching for my key with the other, she’s looking at me anxiously and asking about my day, she’s helping me out of my belted trench coat and hanging up my hat, she’s placing my case by the umbrella stand. Already she is leading me to an armchair—my favorite one, with the thick armrests—where she places a pillow behind my head and touches my forehead with her hand, while at the same time she’s lifting my feet onto the hassock, she’s removing my shoes and pressing her cheek against my leg. “Are you all right?” she asks, looking at me with tender concern. And gazing at me earnestly she asks, “Have you had a hard day?” Later, when she has undressed me, and bathed me, and laid me on the bed, she bends over me and says, “Do you like this?” and “Do you like this?” Still later, waking beside her, I feel a sudden doubt. Roughly I shake her awake. Staring into her sleepy eyes, I tell her that I could never endure a rival, that I’ll leave her instantly if she ever tries a trick like that, she can’t take advantage of me, I wasn’t born yesterday. During my outburst her large, startled eyes fill with tears. Gradually a relief comes over me, I grow calm, I glance at the clock and see that it’s getting late, a yawn shudders through me, and as I close my eyes and begin to drift toward deep, soothing sleep I feel her lying awake beside me, searching for the cause of my distress, rehearsing the events of the past few hours, reproaching herself for not loving me enough, her eyes wide, her heart racing, her cheek resting tensely against my shoulder.