by Steve Berman
Anyway, we did Drowned Meadow, the little area in Port Jefferson where they tried the witches, and Felicia gave me this awkward smile and said, “I live right there.” She pointed to a pre-development house across the road, with flaking paint on the porch and tiny windows. “My mother hates you guys. Let’s just go to the next stop.”
And we did. We snuck into King Park and I showed her the track, and then we slipped in through an open into the giant Building 93, which looked like it was abandoned in a hurry. Rusty bedframes left in the middle of hallways, medical files splayed open and kicked around, even suitcases spilling with old clothes and black-and-white photos from the days when men wore hats and nobody wore jeans.
Then it was the long trip to Amityville and the murder house. She decided to sit up front then, and asked to put the radio on the college station instead of WBAB, which is what everyone listened to because it played a lot of Zep and G&R. Weird ambient grinding noises, punctuated with flutes, came out of the tinny speakers. She said it was relaxing. The house was the usual shit part of the tour, but she stayed close to me the whole time and as headed to Aztakea she drank a little more and our knees touched as I drove.
I had the only flashlight, so Felicia stood close by me, often grabbing my arm when she felt the mud and leaves shift beneath her feet. She was wearing sandals and socks—like I said, weirdo—so she felt almost every little twig. I did my usual spiel, the here-and-there of it all, leading Felicia around in a spiral leading to the boulder.
So, what do you think? We come across Ricky, his neck red and cricked from his prison suicide, knife in hand and fire in his eyes? Or poor old Gary, gaunt and covered in burns, arms out and hands grasping as he stumbles around blindly? Maybe Felicia’s mother, skyclad and all jelly-like planes of flesh, holding a cat on the rock and praying to the Earth Goddess? Or SATIN LIVES! gone and replaced with blasphemous letters from a tongue men were not meant to see, that drives us insane?
Hell, I’d like to tell you what happened was that I finished hissing “Satan lives! Satan lives!” and flashed the light to the boulder and showed her SATIN LIVES! and she freaked, then laughed, then looked a bit sad. Then Felicia stepped up to me, chest out and chin up like she wanted a kiss and I said, “So, yeah. Satin lives,” and gave her one and she liked it, then I put my fist in her hair and she liked that too, and then she pressed against me and guided me to the boulder and undid my pants and gave me a mint sloppy BJ.
And that is almost all that happened, except that when Felicia gave me that sad look, she also started talking. “Wow. My cousin knew these guys, back in middle school. They were all really sweet, even Ricky. Especially Gary. Even when he was totally fucked up, he was nice about it. He’d steal shit, money from his parents, or from a store, but then spend it all on other people. He gave away hundred dollar bills at the roller rink once, and bought this kid a motorcycle with his dad’s credit card. Even Ricky wasn’t bad. They were just all so fucked up. Fucking suburbia fucks kids up. The first crime Ricky ever did was stealing from the church, can you imagine? It was a container of Hi-C fruit punch.” Then she stepped up to me for her kiss, then with her little hands on my shoulders and chest led me to lay across the altar of the stone to better undo my fly and unzip me.
About halfway through, she started whimpering. Her tongue got cold. I said, “Hey, what’s up, Lish?” and she looked up at me, her eyes wet in the foggy beam of my flashlight. “This is so fucked up.”
“Yeah,” I agreed.
“Look, you’re a nice guy. I like you,” Felicia said. I didn’t even get to say “Thanks,” before she said, “My father molests me. Every day since I was three.” Then she started to cry silent tears, like she had to every night so she wouldn’t get caught. Jager and dinner rose to my throat, and I vomited all over the stone.
MR. WOSSLYNNE
Michael Cisco
At the end of my street lives Mr. Wosslynne, that no one has ever seen. He is ensconced, I imagine, in his freezing house yet. You might want to imagine a cold candle when you try to summon up a picture in your mind, the better to understand me, or the better to enter into the spirit of my narration, if you’re so inclined. Conjure a mental impression of a soft, palpable darkness, a little cindery, but limpid too. This doesn’t work, it doesn’t make sense, but try anyway. It is an indoor darkness, and not the brittle kind that shuts out the daylight, which can be broken by a single errant shaft of sun, but rather the captured night that gets caught flowing through houses like the clots of hair that stop up drains. Now, the candle: it should be a pale white, almost blue, like a tube of snow, and the flame is blonde and cool, completely still, shedding wanness into the air without illuminating anything.
If you can see that, then you can surely see Mr. Wosslynne, who is the inhabitant. The house must now be permitted to congeal out of transparency around the candle and the darkness; the house is all made of brick, with small-paned windows that swing out on curved metal arms, and the number 247 appears by the front door on three small tiles held by a little black iron frame. I haven’t the energy at the moment to relate the reasons for my association with Mr. Wosslynne, who tenanted this house, but that there were reasons should not be overpassed in haste; it’s only that, were I to present them, I would necessarily be required to dilate this account farther than any reader’s patience would warrant, and, confronted with the unfortunate choice between boring the reader and mystifying, in this case I prefer to remain mysterious. It should be enough to say that we shared a certain rare interest, although I was the sheerest dilletante in comparison with Mr. Wosslynne, and that we found in each other an uncommon opportunity for upbuilding conversation.
He isn’t invisible. It would not be true to say that he can’t be seen, only that he isn’t seen. No one can be found who is competent to describe his appearance, and it is probable that he has never appeared to anyone. One is aware of him, can carry on conversations with him, and I have, but only something like a gesture will register, if it is possible to imagine a gesture without a face or a hand to make it. To represent it to another, you have to say something like, and then there was a depreciatory gesture, or, then there was a noncommital opening, or, there was an eager attitude.
The owl at the end of the street used to hoot from Mr. Wosslynne’s eaves—such an odd, muffled sound, like an ocarina in a cork-lined basement. Mr. Wosslynne always paused in whatever he might be “saying” at the moment when that owl called, with an introspective note in its call, or more like a private chuckle I thought, so it came to seem as though the owl were interjecting into our “conversation.” The pauses didn’t last long enough to frustrate me. Mr. Wosslynne never noticed anything of that kind; he was habitually either oblivious or indifferent, if those are distinct enough ideas to separate without pleonasm, to my sentiments and exhibited an invarying tranquility all his own when in my company. While he would appear to become nervous or slightly restless now and then, in time I realized that this was not so much an expression of feeling as his way of signalling to me that he would prefer then to be alone, as he usually was. This was Mr. Wosslynne’s “tact.”
Then I would shed the veils of Mr. Wosslynne’s house in the space dividing his door from the pavement and draw the acronychal light into my lungs with a weary, disembodied feeling. As I would walk back to my own door, I would gradually draw fresh strength from the dishevilment a heavy rain or strong wind had left behind in the town, the branches in the street and the sagging front gates hanging half open, that I so love to see.
Gradually the enervation that was the normal after-effect of my conversations with Mr. Wosslynne would become lightness, and I often felt a bracing freedom of movement in my limbs. My own speech and expression seemed to me, as I inwardly observed them, to become a little exaggerated, as though I’d been drinking. There was in particular one sensation, very difficult to describe, that was similar to what I’ve experienced in my altitudes; my spirit would seem to spin inside me, my heavier and more inert body lagging a
fter the motion, so that I seemed to wear it like a ponderous armor. Yet the movement of my spirit was completely unrestricted; my body turned into a dense colossus with my spirit frisking inside it. I’d speak, and my voice was a blast that shook the walls; my inflections were grotesquely broad, my smallest gesture became a grand sweep. The more sensibly precarious my self-control became, the more my self-awareness was intensified.
I never worried about the impression I might make in this condition because I was usually alone. It was not so strange to be alone then; that section of the city, perhaps the city all throughout, was steadily dwindling. I suppose this kind of alteration is not remarkable in the history of very old cities, and that they wax and wane like glaciers. Certainly there was no question of emergency; I believed the people were simply and unhastily taking themselves away elsewhere. The crowds I used to see on the corners, especially toward the end of the day as the lamps were being lit, shrank to knots of two and three, and at night the noise of the city came from far away. A steady, tidal yawn. I could stop whatever I was doing, knife in midair, to listen for any length of time, without hearing any sound from nearby. It was always as if it were snowing heavily.
Mr. Wosslynne was expecting me, but I had to buy him some cigarettes first. Mr. Wosslynne smoked incessantly, at least in my presence. Somehow his house didn’t smell at all of smoke, nor did I find I left his house with the smell of cigarette smoke in my clothes or in my hair, which in any case one generally doesn’t notice until washing one’s hair after an interview with the smoker. Nor did I see him smoke. A lit cigarette could however always be seen, invariably in its place, an appealing little dimple in the edge of a superb black ashtray with a cigar company’s name in gold on the side. “PARNERGA.” Perched on the cigarette’s tip would be a slender, unperturbed plume of smoke drawing a straight line to the rafters. It’s possible I might have seen a cigarette or two somewhere else, I seem to recall something like that, but not distinctly, and neither do I remember how I started bringing Mr. Wosslynne packs of cigarettes, but it was one of those things that I’d imagined couldn’t be stopped once they’ve started.
The elevator buttons are like discs of snow that light dull peach-colored fires behind them when pushed. I enjoyed the suave glide of the doors and the smooth motion of the elevator. That’s my mailbox in the lobby wall. I looked inside. No messages. Who delivered them? Who swept up? The city seemed virtually evacuated, but if anything I felt an increase in the indeterminate presence in the streets and buildings, as though invisible, silent immigrants had taken possession.
Outside a huge shoal of birds swooped past in the air by the railway trestle, arcing round forming two groups, to return to their tree, like it had all been a joke that didn’t turn out. I decided there were more and more birds those days. A flurry of wind jostled me and nearly plucked my hat from my head. I reached up to steady it (jolted my glasses with the corner of my cuff) and then, when the air was calm again, I lowered my hands and looked at them. They looked old, the skin creased and seamed like elastic tissue paper. They should have gifts buried in them. Now and then my attention untethers and follows every thing that presents itself; I don’t like these states, I feel under a spell. A burst of song erupted by my ear. One of the birds was standing on top of the brick wall, and I saw a gear under the wing as it lifted, and the being flew away. Walking to the corner I noticed a clicking sound—the bead on my hat’s chin ribbon tapping against me with each step. Did it always click like that? I wondered. If it did, then I’ve been ignoring it effortlessly all this time, I thought.
Lately I had been having difficulty buying cigarettes, his kind of course but then any kind—all the stores were always closed, though lit just the same. After a startling consultation with my watch I ventured to try a door, and found it open. The store was empty, with no one even minding the counter. I supposed the he, or she, might be out of sight in the back of the store, the ‘back’ I supposed they had. It felt curious being in the store alone. All the same the register and the counter together seemed to trace a form, the way sometimes a chair will, especially one that has been worn characteristically, or the way sometimes a cast-off garment will actually always do. Also the aisles suggested forms, the roundness of the cans stacked on the selves suggested the size of hands to grasp them, same for the width of boxes, the dimensions of doors and windows, all conformable.
I leant over the counter and simply took one, then several, packets of Mr. Wosslynne’s kind of cigarettes. I then placed an amount of money commensurate with what I calculated to be their price on the counter, noticing then that the till was ajar. I opened the drawer. It was empty—not even a penny. I looked to see if there really were no money, inexplicably still unsure that the drawer was empty even though I could plainly see that not a penny was there. I arranged my money quickly and firmly shut the till, and the compartments in the drawer measured my fingers.
This one-sided exchange took far longer than it should have done; I ran the distance to Mr. Wosslynne’s house very quickly, and arrived without a trace of fatigue. I was anxious to be even a little late, perhaps because I had always previously been strictly punctual and so I had no idea what sort of response I might meet with; while the subject had never come up, I was enough in awe of Mr. Wosslynne to fear his disapproval. A disagreeable, coiling, ever-changing and weak sensation as it were throbbed in me while I strode up the path to his door, and at the same time my speedy running had left as its residue a whirling, startled and unsettled agitation in my mind. I nearly felt exalted.
My ring went unanswered, and, as my thoughts cleared, I fretted a bit at the thought that perhaps Mr. Wosslynne ignored me in disgust. I had never known him to go out, and for that matter he had never cancelled or postponed a meeting: we met, invariably, at the same time. Of course, I knew he did go out, but I understood without needing to be told that his comings and goings were not of the usual kind, making it pointless to try to include them in ordinary social calculations. There never could be any question of Mr. Wosslynne being there, as it was necessary to believe he was, but only whether he were receiving.
Time passed, and I decided to leave, first slipping the packet of cigarettes into the mail chute, listening for the slide and soft pat they made inside. There was a face in the window as I walked past the house, stopping me in my tracks because Mr. Wosslynne had never used his windows in that way, he would have had to “crouch” by the sill and peer out, “the glass fogging in front of his nose,” so to speak, and I didn’t have to see it clearly to know certainly it wasn’t Mr. Wosslynne’s face. There was simply no question of that, although, as I’ve never seen Mr. Wosslynne’s face, I can’t actually account for my being as sure as I was. I did have to look closely for a moment, over the brick wall, to see it was my face. It blinked, and swayed, as I did. But it shouldn’t have been gazing out at me as I passed.
I went back around, through the gate, and to the side of the house. My face was still there in the window, blinking, mouth a little slack—my reflection as far as I could tell. It was livid pink and orange, the color seemed more intense than it should have been in the dim light just after sunset, and it hovered in a gap of darkness between the sill and the blind, which had been left a little raised.
Gradually, as I looked on in defiance of the idea that I was spying, my face drew closer, and my gaze went through the apertures of its eyesockets. (These were overhung by shadows that leaned down over the cheeks as I drew closer.) Beyond the window I could see a plain room with two beds in it, jutting out with their feet set against opposing walls and the heads, without bedsteads, separated by a narrow space about wide enough for a man to sidle through. There didn’t seem to be anything else in the room. When I withdrew, there was no reflection in the window.
Later that evening another strange thing happened as I stood in my bathroom. I was examining my face in the mirror: there’s a subtle asymmetry to my features that people find a little off-putting. I saw all the world’s mirrors were teeth
in nervous jaws that open wider and wider, with a writhing around the teeth there. There was a dim shuddering tongue, mirror streaming from the teeth and frothing down charred lips to drop from the jaw in thick clots. They fell from the jaws in trembling clouds that floated in a way that disturbed me. My mouth watered, and I felt ill for a moment. My breath I thought tasted sooty, and I incessantly held it, to feel it inflate my chest, throat, mouth, sinuses, and even my skull, or so I picture it to myself. To my mind’s eye, my breath was black, and filled my hollow body like smoke. A flash of cold engulfed me, my body tingled and that instant went numb. Again I observed the vibrating mirror jaw and the gouts of reflection oozing from it like a lanced abcess, and my body was nothing more than an outline in the wind, I thought, or a shape of cold particles.
What was this mouth? I thought I heard myself, and that seemed to cause me slightly to condense; with an abrupt hope of delivering myself, I labored to create the sound of speech, which I was not able to hear distinctly. I simply was pushing out, by an overall convulsion, a continuous sound. Nothing could be seen as I did this, as if my eyes were clenched tightly shut with the effort of making the sound of speech, although I was not aware whether or not I were seeing in the usual sense. Gradually, heavy mantles of weight, it seemed, dropped onto me one by one. Even when I felt certain, in a dreamlike way, that the crisis, whatever its nature, was over, and that my body was solid once more, I remained motionless where I was. I was certain I had to be extremely cautious for a time; as though I wouldn’t manage to retain myself if I made any but the slowest, smallest, most tentative motions of which I was capable.