by Peter Straub
At that moment, I realized that I had already chosen knowledge over ignorance, whatever the consequences. My heart calmed, and I began to take in what was around me.
The trunks of many trees filled my vision, brown, gray, silver, some almost black, their hides varied from wrinkled corrugations to perfect shining smoothness. Trembling pools of light lay across the gray-green floor. The air was a floating, silvery gray. Far off loomed the wooden mountain of a deadfall. Overhead, leafy crowns knitted together, and squirrels’ nests sat on upper branches like ragged bolls.
Then, as if they had come into being all at once, I could see the squirrels everywhere, leaping from branches, landing on twiggy shoots, and swaying downward to rocket up again in an endless chase. Birds of all descriptions crisscrossed the gauzy air. A fox materialized within a cube of empty air, pricked up its ears, and stopped moving with one paw still raised.
On the last Sunday before summer vacation, when coincidentally or not Canon Reed had spent the morning vainly attempting to take the sting out of Luke 12:49, I came to cast fire upon the earth, and would have it that it were already kindled!, I saw the first faint traces of the blue fire and knew that the summer would be a time of wonders.
Intermittent, vertical strips of pale green appeared and coalesced between the more distant trees. When I came nearer, I saw that I was approaching a clearing. I reached the last of the trees. Before me was a grassy oval, unnervingly quiet. Unobstructed sun beat down upon a pad of yellow-green grasses.
As soon as I moved out from beneath the canopy, the temperature heated up but good. I could hardly see, in all that brightness. At the center of the clearing, I sat down with my eyes just above the top of the grass. A flattened trail arrowed toward me. I wiped my forehead and blinked against the dazzle of the sun. When I breathed in, the clearing breathed with me. An electric current ran up my arms and into my chest.
I knew awe and pleasure. I knew more was to come. Within the me within the clearing sat a me who needed time to get used to his surroundings. We sat together in our different realms and adjusted to our new conditions. There would be more, but the nature of the more could not as yet be imagined.
A bluebird ventured out of the woods, and I tracked its arrogant, overhead loop.
Within, my newborn self spoke, and I sent a thought flying to the bluebird. As quick as anything, that bluebird crumpled its wings and fell, lifeless as an anvil.
On the way home, I tried to do the same to a crow sneering at me from a telephone wire, but the blasted thing refused to drop dead. So did a holstein ruminating behind a fence at the edge of the road, and I had no better luck with Sarge, an elderly police dog twitching in sleep on his owner’s front lawn. I had been given a tool that had come without an instruction manual. Thinking as a child, I assumed that installments of the instruction manual were to be steadily delivered over a reasonable time.
Little did I know.
9
Because my board scores were surprisingly good, I wound up being accepted by all four of the colleges I applied to. As a product of foster care whose only legal parent made so little money she had never even filed with the IRS, I was offered full-tuition scholarships, free housing, and a variety of jobs at each school, so I did not have to count on Phil Grant to lay out the customary fortune. He would have refinanced his house and taken out loans to keep him in debt until retirement, if that was what I needed. That I would not be costing Phil a lot of money made me happy, but most of my happiness was relief.
In the end, I decided on Middlemount, disappointing Phil, who had all but assumed since my acceptance at Princeton, his alma mater, that I would wind up there. I couldn’t see myself at such a high-pressure school, and I didn’t like the idea of being surrounded by a lot of rich kids. Also, although I never mentioned it during our talks over the kitchen table, I knew that in spite of all the financial aid, Princeton would take more money out of Phil’s pocket than Middlemount. On the sensible grounds that we were talking about my decision, not his, Laura took my side in these discussions, which helped him come around. So I went to Middlemount College in Middlemount, Vermont, and my life began to unravel.
When my jock roommate followed his instantaneous loathing of everything I represented by crowding great numbers of his prep-school chums into our room night after night to yell about fags, niggers, kikes, car wrecks, sailing catastrophes, broken backs, broken necks, instances of total paralysis, kikes, fags, spics, and niggers, I complained loudly enough to get reassigned to a single room.
Once I got a single room I hardly saw anyone at all outside of classes. In spite of my SAT scores, my math and science courses seemed to be conducted in a foreign language. I had to struggle up to and past exhaustion just to lag behind. Sometimes I looked up from my desk at a string of gibberish Professor Flagship, the calculus teacher, was scrolling across the blackboard and felt myself fall through a hole in the earth’s crust. I spent whole weeks doing nothing but shuttling between the dorm, classrooms, my meal job, and the library. Then it started to get cold.
Winter hit Vermont right after Thanksgiving. The temperature sank to twenty degrees, and the cold gripped my skin like a claw. When it went down to ten degrees, the wind rolling down out of the mountains threatened to tear off my face. In the overheated classrooms, I could feel the cold moving into the marrow of my bones. For two months, the sun retreated behind a lead-lined curtain the color of gray flannel. Before long, starless night clamped down abruptly at 5:00. The worst cold of my life brought on perpetual sneezing and coughing and sent aches to every part of my body. I trudged to classes, but the supervisor at my meal job declared me a health hazard and granted sick leave. After forcing down whatever I could of the cafeteria’s starchy dinners, too tired to face another Nanook-style trek across the tundra to the library, I fell asleep at my desk while trying to cram Introductory Calculus into my stupefied head. Daily, second by second, I was being erased into a shadow.
The one thing that kept me from feeling as though I already had become a shadow was my guitar and what happened when I played it. For my twelfth birthday, which had not failed to be marked by the usual horror show, the Grants had given me a nice old Gibson, along with what turned out to be years of lessons from a sympathetic teacher. I brought my guitar with me to Middlemount, and now and then when my room closed in around me, I went to a corner of the dorm’s lounge and played there.
Mostly, I added voicings to harmonies in my dogged, step-by-step way, but sometimes other students came in and sat close enough to listen. When I found that I had an audience, I played things like a Bach fugue my teacher had transcribed, a blues line I learned off a Gene Ammons record, and a version of “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be” cribbed from Jim Hall. If anyone was still listening, I threw in a few songs whose chord changes I could remember. “My Romance” was one, and “Easy Living,” “Moonlight in Vermont,” and a jazz tune called “Whisper Not.” I made mistakes and got lost, but none of my fellow dormies knew anything was wrong unless I stopped and went back to where I’d been before my fingers turned into Popsicle sticks. Half of them never listened to anything but the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, and Tina Turner, and the other half never listened to anything but the Carpenters, the Bee Gees, and Elton John. (The ones that always wore black and listened to Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen avoided the lounge like the plague.) What I played sounded like classical music to most of them, but they liked it anyhow. And I liked playing for them, because it reminded me that I had not always been a hermit. The other happy result of my playing was the renovation of my public identity from That Weird Ned Guy Who Never Comes Out of His Room to That Freaky Ned Who Can Play Really Good Guitar Once He Gets Out of His Room.
At Christmas break, I went back to Naperville and acted as though everything was fine, apart from some trouble with calculus. Without telling any actual lies, I described a challenging routine of work and occasional pleasures, and put down my unhappiness to homesickness. As soon as I said the word, I
realized that I had been more homesick for Naperville and the Grants than I had been willing to admit. As my cold lessened and I alternated between writing a paper for English, reviewing notes for my final exams, and settling back into my old place in the household, the version of college life I had invented began to seem less fictional and more like the reality I would have known had I not felt so lost.
The day after Christmas, I heard a car turn into the driveway and went to the living room window to watch Star wheel up to the garage in a handsome old Lincoln. She emerged wearing high heels, an elaborate hat, and a black coat too light for the cold. Star was living in Cleveland that year, exchanging work at a lithography studio for lessons from an artist she had met while he was in residence at Albertus. On weekends, she was singing in a club called Inside the Outside. Laura Grant called out from the kitchen, “Ned, your mother’s here!” Buttoning his blazer and sucking in his tummy, Phil came out of the alcove off the living room, where he watched television. “Don’t make her freeze out there, kiddo,” he said. Star was hurrying up the flagstone path, and when I opened the door she sailed in like a swan, hiding her nervousness behind a brilliant smile. She put her arms around me, and the Grants both started talking at once, and I could feel her begin to calm down.
The rest of the day was comfortable and relaxed. Star gave me a cashmere sweater, I gave her a boxed set of Billie Holiday reissues, and what she got from the Grants nicely balanced the few little things she had brought for them. Laura prepared two lavish meals, and I continued to develop my sanitized version of life at Middlemount. Phil and Laura left us alone after dinner, and Star asked, “Are you thinking about being a musician? I sure liked hearing about you playing for your friends at that school.”
I told her that I’d never be good enough to satisfy myself.
“You could be better than you are now,” she said, “and you’d be able to work, so you could leave college, if you wanted to. If any of the musicians I know have college degrees, they keep it a secret.”
Surprised, I asked her why I would want to leave college.
“Know how you sound when you talk about Middlemount?” she asked. “Like you’re describing a movie.”
“It’s a good college.”
“You don’t have to tell me it’s a good college. I just wonder if it’s a good college for Ned Dunstan. Look at you. You lost about fifteen, twenty pounds, and you’ve been missing way too much sleep. The only reason you’re halfway healthy is Laura’s been giving you plenty of her good food.”
“I had a rotten cold,” I said.
“Your cold wasn’t all that was rotten, if you ask me. Maybe you want to make college sound better than it is.”
“After I get through the finals, everything’ll be fine,” I said. Phil and Laura came in offering coffee and nightcaps, and before everybody went to bed we listened to the eighteen-year-old Billie Holiday singing “When You’re Smiling” and “Ooh Ooh Ooh, What a Little Moonlight Can Do.”
The next morning Laura and Star went out shopping, and Star came home with a new coat from Biegelman’s purchased at 60 percent off because Mr. Biegelman thought it would never look as good on anyone else. As Laura told the story, she gave me a sideways look that was half question, half accusation. Star seemed to be avoiding looking at me altogether. Laura finished talking and my mother left to hang up the coat. She gave me a murky glance on her way out of the room. Phil noticed nothing, for which I was grateful. Laura said, “Did you boys stay home all the time we were out?”
“You bet,” Phil said. “We had a hell of a time kicking out the dancing girls before you got back.”
My mother drifted into the living room, smiled more in my direction than at me, and glanced at the couch like a cat deciding where to settle down. Phil cleared his throat and challenged her to their annual Christmas chess championship. She grinned at him with what looked to me like relief.
Before the start of this tradition, I would have said that given two tries at telling a pawn from a rook, my mother would have been right at least once, but she was good enough to beat Phil about one game in four. This time, he was frowning at the board and muttering, “Hold on, I don’t get it,” ten minutes after they started. (It turned out that the lithographer in Cleveland was a demon chess player.)
I followed Laura into the kitchen, expecting her to share my amusement at her husband’s consternation. “Either she got a lot better since last year, or Phil forgot how to play,” I said.
Laura moved across the kitchen, leaned against the sink, and permitted my remark to shrivel in the air between us. The look she gave me had nothing to do with amusement. “I thought I knew you pretty well, but now I’m beginning to wonder.” She crossed her arms across her chest.
“About what?”
“Did you leave the house while we were gone?”
I shook my head.
“You didn’t go downtown. Or to Biegelman’s.”
“What’s all this about? You and Star have been acting weird ever since you got back.”
“That’s not an answer.” She was staring fiercely into my eyes.
“No,” I said, beginning to get irritated. “I didn’t go to Biegelman’s. Biegelman’s is a women’s clothing store. I don’t think I’ve ever been inside it in my whole life.” I made myself calm down. “What’s going on?”
“A mistake, I guess,” Laura said.
In the other room, my mother laughed and cried out, “Phil, don’t you know anything about Capablanca?”
“He’s dead, and so am I,” Phil said.
“Star’s worried about you.” Laura was still searching my face.
“There’s nothing to worry about.”
“Are you getting enough sleep? Do you walk around feeling exhausted all the time?”
Most of the time, I walked around feeling half-dead. “I’m tired sometimes, but it’s no big deal.”
“Are you happy at Middlemount? If it’s getting to be too much for you, you can always take a semester off.”
I began to get angry all over again. “First everybody is pushing me into college, and now everybody wants to push me out. I wish you’d make up your minds.”
She looked stricken. “Ned, did we push you into college? Is that how it feels to you?”
I already regretted my words.
“Think of how much those colleges wanted you. It’s a great opportunity. Besides that, not having a college degree would be a tremendous disadvantage later in life.” She lifted her chin and looked away. “Boy oh boy. Maybe we did push you. But all we wanted was what we thought would be best for you.” She looked back at me. “You’re the only person who can tell me what’s best for you, and you better be honest about it. Don’t worry about Phil, either. He feels the same way.”
She meant that she would be able to explain a leave of absence to him, if that was what I wanted. The thought of Phil’s disappointment made me feel like a traitor. “I guess I’ll have to get straight As and be elected president of my class before you and Star stop worrying,” I said.
“Hey, Ned!” Phil shouted from the other room. “Your mother and Bobby Fischer, separated at birth, is that the deal?”
“Okay,” Laura said. “We’ll see how you feel at semester break. In the meantime, please remember that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, all right?”
Over lunch, the astonished Phil explained the Machiavellian stratagems by which my mother had sandbagged him. Star ate half of what was on her plate, looked at her watch, and stood up from the table. She had a long drive ahead of her, time to go, thanks so much, goodbye.
By the time I carried her bag downstairs, she was giving Laura a hug from the depths of her new winter coat. I walked her down the path to the Lincoln, wondering if she thought she could get in and drive away without speaking to me. We came up to the car door, and I said, “Mom.” She wrapped me in her arms.
“Come with me,” she said. “Throw a few things into a suitcase and tell those nice people you�
�re going to stay with me while you think things over.”
“What?” I pulled back and looked at her. She was serious.
“I have enough room to put you up. You can wait tables at Inside the Outside until we find something better.”
If she had sandbagged Phil, what she was doing to me felt like a mugging. “What’s going on? Laura’s after me about transferring or dropping out for a semester, you can’t even look at me, both of you act like I turned into some person you don’t even like…. I’m not where I’m supposed to be, I’m too skinny, I’m a liar…. All of a sudden, come to Cleveland …” I raised my arms and shook my head in bafflement. “If you can, explain it to me, how about that?”
“I want to protect you,” she said.
I couldn’t help it—I laughed at her. “Middlemount’s a lot safer than a nightclub in the middle of Cleveland.”
Some thought, an explanation or rebuttal, surged across her face. She visibly thrust it away. “Maybe I never had a chance to go to college. But you know what? Working at Inside the Outside isn’t such a bad deal.”
I had offended her. Even worse, I had insulted her. “Hey, Mom, I never wanted to go to Middlemount, it just happened.”
“Then get in the car.”
“I can’t.” In the face of her huge, silent challenge, I said, “I did have a lot of problems, but I can work them out.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “The things you don’t know, they’d fill a football stadium.”
“Like what?” I said, remembering the refusal I had just seen.
“You and me, honey, we don’t know anything at all.” The warmth of the new coat enveloped me once more, and when I felt her arms and shoulders tremble as she kissed my cheek, I almost decided to climb into the old Lincoln and drive away. Star patted the back of my head twice, three times, waited a beat, then once more. “Get back inside before you freeze to death.”