by Peter Straub
Divorced, an editor at a paperback firm, she had called to congratulate me after my second novel was favorably reviewed in the Times, and on this slim but well-intentioned foundation we began to construct a long and troubled love affair. Back in the surroundings of my childhood, I felt profoundly uneasy, having spent the day beside my mother’s hospital bed without knowing if she understood or even recognized me, and I thought of Mei-Mei with sudden longing. I wanted her in my arms, and I yearned for my purposeful, orderly dreaming adult life in New York. I wanted to call Mei-Mei, but it was past midnight in the Midwest, an hour later in New York, and Mei-Mei, no owl, would have gone to bed hours earlier. Then I remembered my mother lying stricken in the narrow hospital bed, and suffered a spasm of guilt for thinking about my lover. For a deluded moment I imagined that it was my duty to move back into the house and see if I could bring my mother back to life while I did what I could for my retired father. At that moment I remembered, as I often did, an orange-haired boy enveloped in a red wool shirt. Sweat poured from my forehead, my chest.
Then a terrifying thing happened to me. I tried to get out of bed to go the bathroom and found that I could not move. My arms and legs were cast in cement; they were lifeless and would not move. I thought that I was having a stroke, like my mother. I could not even cry out—my throat, too, was paralyzed. I strained to push myself up off the ^narrow)bed and smelled that someone very near, someone just out of sight or around the corner, was making popcorn and heating butter. Another wave of sweat gouted out of my inert body, turning the sheet and the pillowcase slick and cold.
I saw—as if I were writing it—my seven-year-old self hesitating before the entrance of a theater a few blocks from this house. Hot, flat, yellow sunlight fell over everything, cooking the life from the wide boulevard. I saw myself turn away, felt my stomach churn with the smoke of underground fires, saw myself begin to run. Vomit backed up in my throat. My arms and legs convulsed, and I fell out of bed and managed to crawl out of the room and down the hall to throw up in the toilet behind the closed door of the bathroom.
——
My age, as I write these words, is forty-three. I have written five novels over a period of nearly twenty years, “only” five, each of them more difficult, harder to write than the one before. To maintain this hobbled pace of a novel every four years, I must sit at my desk at least six hours every day; I must consume hundreds of boxes of typing paper, scores of yellow legal pads, forests of pencils, miles of black ribbon. It is a fierce, voracious activity. Every sentence must be tested three or four ways, made to clear fences like a horse. The purpose of every sentence is to be an arrow into the secret center of the book. To find my way into the secret center I must hold the entire book, every detail and rhythm, in my memory. This comprehensive act of memory is the most crucial task of my life.
My books get flattering reviews, which usually seem to describe other, more linear novels, and they win occasional awards—I am one of those writers whose advances are funded by the torrents of money spun off by best-sellers. Lately I have had the impression that the general perception of me, to the extent that such a thing exists, is that of a hermetic painter enscribing hundreds of tiny, grotesque, fantastical details over every inch of a large canvas. (My books are unfashionably long.) I teach writing at various colleges, give occasional lectures, am modestly enriched by grants. This is enough, more than enough. Now and then I am both dismayed and amused to discover that a young writer I have met at a PEN reception or a workshop regards my life with envy. Envy misses the point completely.
“If you were going to give me one piece of advice,” a young woman at a conference asked me, “I mean, real advice, not just the obvious stuff about keeping on writing, what would it be? What would you tell me to do?”
I won’t tell you, but I’ll write it out, I said, and picked up one of the conference flyers and printed a few words on its back. Don’t read this until you are out of the room, I said, and watched while she folded the flyer into her bag.
What I had printed on the back of the flyer was: go to a lot of movies.
——
On the Sunday after the ferry trip I could not hit a single ball in the park. My eyes kept closing, and as soon as my eyelids came down, visions started up like movies—quick, automatic dreams. My arms seemed too heavy to lift. After I had trudged home behind my dispirited father, I collapsed on the sofa and slept straight through to dinner. In a dream a spacious box confined me, and I drew colored pictures of elm trees, the sun, wide fields, mountains, and rivers on its walls. At dinner loud noises, never scarce around the twins, made me jump. That kid’s not right, I swear to you, my father said. When my mother asked if I wanted to go to Play School on Monday, my stomach closed up like a fist. I have to, I said, I’m really fine, I have to go. Sentences rolled from my mouth, meaning nothing, or meaning the wrong thing. For a moment of confusion I thought that I really was going to the playground, and saw black asphalt, deep as a field, where a few children, diminished by perspective, clustered at the far end. I went to bed right after dinner. My mother pulled down the shades, turned off the light, and finally left me alone. From above came the sound, like a beast’s approximation of music, of random notes struck on a piano. I knew only that I was scared, not why. The next day I had to go to a certain place, but I could not think where until my fingers recalled the velvety plush of the end seat on the middle aisle. Then black-and-white images, full of intentional menace, came to me from the previews I had seen for two weeks—The Hitch-Hiker, starring Edmund O’Brien. The spiny anteater and nun bat were animals found only in Australia.
I longed for Alan Ladd, “Ed Adams,” to walk into the room with his reporter’s notebook and pencil, and knew that I had something to remember without knowing what it was.
After a long time the twins cascaded into the bedroom, undressed, put on pajamas, brushed their teeth. The front door slammed—my father had gone out to the taverns. In the kitchen, my mother ironed shirts and talked to herself in a familiar, rancorous voice. The twins went to sleep. I heard my mother put away the ironing board and walk down the hall to the living room.
I saw “Ed Adams” calmly walking up and down on the sidewalk outside our house, as handsome as a god in his neat gray suit. “Ed” went all the way to the end of the block, put a cigarette in his mouth, and leaned into a sudden, round flare of brightness before exhaling smoke and walking away. I knew I had fallen asleep only when the front door slammed for the second time that night and woke me up.
——
In the morning my father struck his fist against the bedroom door and the twins jumped out of bed and began yelling around the bedroom, instantly filled with energy. As in a cartoon, into the bedroom drifted tendrils of the odor of frying bacon. My brothers jostled toward the bathroom. Water rushed into the sink and the toilet bowl, and my mother hurried in, her face tightened down over her cigarette, and began yanking the twins into their clothes. “You made your decision,” she said to me, “now I hope you’re going to make it to the playground on time.” Doors opened, doors slammed shut. My father shouted from the kitchen, and I got out of bed. Eventually I sat down before the bowl of cereal. My father smoked and did not meet my eyes. The cereal tasted of dead leaves. “You look the way that asshole upstairs plays piano,” my father said. He dropped quarters on the table and told me not to lose that money.
After he left, I locked myself in the bedroom. The piano dully resounded overhead like a sound track. I heard the cups and dishes rattle in the sink, the furniture moving by itself, looking for something to hunt down and kill. Love me, love me, the radio called from beside a family of brown-and-white porcelain spaniels. I heard some light, whispery thing, a lamp or a magazine, begin to slide around the living room. I am imagining all this, I said to myself, and tried to concentrate on a Black hawk comic book. The pictures jigged and melted in their panels. Love me, Blackhawk cried out from the cockpit of his fighter as he swooped down to exterminate a nest of ye
llow, slant-eyed villains. Outside, fire raged beneath the streets, trying to pull the world apart. When I dropped the comic book and closed my eyes, the noises ceased and 1 could hear the hovering stillness of perfect attention. Even Blackhawk, belted into his airplane within the comic book, was listening to what I was doing.
——
In thick, hazy sunlight I went down Sherman Boulevard toward the Orpheum-Oriental. Around me the world was motionless, frozen like a frame in a comic strip. After a time I noticed that the cars on the boulevard and the few people on the sidewalk had not actually frozen into place but instead were moving with great slowness. I could see men’s legs advancing within their trousers, the knee coming forward to strike the crease, the cuff slowly lifting off the shoe, the shoe drifting up like Tom Cat’s paw when he crept toward Jerry Mouse. The warm, patched skin of Sherman Boulevard … I thought of walking along Sherman Boulevard forever, moving past the nearly immobile cars and people, past the theater, past the liquor store, through the gates and past the wading pool and swings, past the elephants and lions reaching out to be fed, past the secret park where my father flailed in a rage of disappointment, past the elms and out the opposite gate, past the big houses on the opposite side of the park, past picture windows and past lawns with bikes and plastic pools, past slanting driveways and basketball hoops, past men getting out of cars, past playgrounds where children raced back and forth on a surface shining black. Then past fields and crowded markets, past high yellow tractors with mud dried like old wool inside the enormous hubs, past eloquent cats and fearful lions on wagons piled high with hay, past deep woods where lost children followed trails of bread crumbs to a gingerbread door, past other cities where nobody would see me because nobody knew my name, past everything, past everybody.
——
At the Orpheum-Oriental, I stopped still. My mouth was dry and me eyes would not focus. Everything around me, so quiet and still a moment earlier, jumped into life as soon as I stopped walking. Horns blared, cars roared down the boulevard. Beneath these sounds I heard the pounding of great machines, and the fires gobbling up oxygen beneath the street. As if I had eaten them from the air, fire and smoke poured into my stomach. Flame slipped up my throat and sealed the back of my mouth. In my mind I saw myself taking the first quarter from my pocket, exchanging it for a ticket, pushing through the door, and moving into the cool air. I saw myself holding out the ticket to be torn in half, going over an endless brown carpet toward the inner door. From the last row of seats on the other side of the inner door, inside the shadowy but not yet dark theater, a shapeless monster whose wet black mouth said Love me, love me stretched yearning arms toward me. Shock froze my shoes to the sidewalk, then shoved me firmly in the small of the back, and I was running down the block, unable to scream because I had to clamp my lips against the smoke and fire trying to explode from my mouth.
——
The rest of that afternoon remains vague. I wandered through the streets, not in the clean, hollow way I had imagined but almost blindly, hot and uncertain. I remember the taste of fire in my mouth and the loudness of my heart. After a time I found myself before the elephant enclosure in the zoo. A newspaper reporter in a neat gray suit passed through the space before me, and I followed him, knowing that he carried a notebook in his pocket, and that he had been beaten by gangsters, that he could locate the speaking secret that hid beneath the disconnected and dismembered pieces of the world. He would fire his pistol on an empty chamber and trick evil “Solly Wellman,” Berry Kroeger; with his girlish, watchful eyes. And when “Solly Wellman” came gloating out of the shadow, the reporter would shoot him dead.
Dead.
Donna Reed smiled down from an upstairs window: has there ever been a smile like that? Ever? I was in Chicago, and behind a closed door “Blackie Franchot!) bled onto a brown carpet. “Solly Wellman,” something like “Solly Wellman,” called and called to me from the decorated grave where he lay like a secret. The man in the gray suit finally carried his notebook and his gun through a front door, and I saw that I was only a few blocks from home.
——
Paul leans against the wire fence surrounding the playground, looking out, looking backward. Alan Ladd brushes off “Leona” for she has no history that matters and exists only in the world of work and pleasure, of cigarettes and cocktail bars. Beneath this world is another, and “Leona’s” life is a blind, strenuous denial of that other world.
——
My mother held her hand to my forehead and declared that I not only had a fever but had been building up to it all week. I was not to go to the playground that next day; I had to spend the day lying down on Mrs. Candee’s couch. When she lifted the telephone to call one of the high-school girls, I said not to bother, other kids were gone all the time, and she put down the receiver.
——
I lay on Mrs. Candee’s couch staring up at the ceiling of her darkened living room. The twins squabbled outside, and maternal, slow-witted Mrs. Candee brought me orange juice. The twins ran toward the sandbox, and Mrs. Candee groaned as she let herself fall into a wobbly lawn chair. The morning newspaper folded beneath the lawn chair said that The Hitch-Hiker and Double Cross had begun playing at the Orpheum-Oriental. Chicago Deadline had done its work and traveled on. It had broken the world in half and sealed the monster deep within. Nobody but me knew this. Up and down the block, sprinklers whirred, whipping loops of water onto the dry lawns. Men driving slowly up and down the street hung their elbows out of their windows. For a moment free of regret and nearly without emotion of any kind, I understood that I belonged utterly to myself. Like everything else,. I had been torn asunder and glued back together with shock, vomit, and orange juice. The knowledge sifted into me that I was all alone. “Stan,” “Jimmy,” whatever his name was, would never come back to the theater. He would be afraid that I had told my parents and the police about him. I knew that I had killed him by forgetting him, and then I forgot him again.
——
The next day I went back to the theater and went through the inner door and saw row after row of empty seats falling toward the curtained screen. I was all alone. The size and grandeur of the theater surprised me. I went down the long, descending aisle and took the last seat, left side, on the broad middle aisle. The next row seemed nearly a playground’s distance away. The lights dimmed and the curtains rippled slowly away from the screen. Anticipatory music filled the air, and the first letters appeared on the screen.
——
What I am, what I do, why I do it. I am simultaneously a man in his early forties, that treacherous time, and a boy of seven before whose bravery I shall forever fall short. I live underground in a wooden room and patiently, in joyful concentration, decorate the walls. Before me, half unseen, hangs a large and appallingly complicated vision I must explore and memorize, must witness again and again in order to locate its hidden center. Around me, everything is in its proper place. My typewriter sits on the sturdy table. Beside the typewriter a cigarette smolders, raising a gray stream of smoke. A record revolves on the turntable, and my small apartment is dense with music. (“Bird of Prey Blues,” with Coleman Hawkins, Buck Clayton, and Hank Jones.) Beyond my walls and windows is a world toward which I reach with outstretched arms and an ambitious and divided heart. As if “Bird of Prey Blues” has evoked them, the voices of sentences to be written this afternoon, tomorrow, or next month stir and whisper, beginning to speak, and I lean over the typewriter toward them, getting as close as I can.
INTERLUDE:
GOING HOME
They had come back to their home town to help her father move into a high-rise nursing home that looked like a luxury hotel. The rooms had a bland impersonality that made even the residents’ old furniture look like it belonged in a hotel suite, and everybody liked the home a good deal. Most of the new residents experienced a period of euphoria after moving in. In the mornings, a girl at a desk pushed a button that set off a buzzer in every room, and if you did n
ot answer your buzzer they sent a man to see what had happened to you. The food was substantial and tasteless, and the large dining room was always crowded. There were prayer meetings and discussion groups. Everyone watched a lot of television. She and her husband sat in her father’s new living room, on furniture she had known all her life, and listened to her father talk over the noise from the television.
One afternoon, they drove across town to her husband’s old neighborhood—the neighborhood where he had been a small child, before his family had moved even farther away, to the suburbs. They got out of the car and walked up, then down the block, then crossed into the alley and walked up and down behind his old house. It looked as he remembered it—a two-story brown and yellow duplex with a small, patchy backyard. The house had been cared for. Yet the neighborhood was not what he remembered. All the elm trees had died, and the neighborhood was mysteriously larger—everything was bigger than he remembered, everything was cleaner and brighter. It was he who was smaller now. They walked a little bit away, into another of the little side streets that ran alongside a broad avenue, and here too everything was charged with a blazing, glowing familiarity. He felt a sudden emotion move into his chest like an alien force: a large, virtually featureless block of feeling that constricted his breathing and pushed tears into his eyes. He could not tell if this feeling were grief or joy or some unbearable mixture of the two. He had been a child right here, in this place, and the unbearable feeling came from the center of his childhood.