Mr. X

by Peter Straub

  Sometimes I think that everyone I’ve ever known has had the feeling of missing a mysterious but essential quality, that they all wanted to find an unfindable place that would be the right place, and that since Adam in the Garden human life has been made of these aches and bruises. Just before I turned twenty-six, I got a job in telephone sales for an infant software company in Durham, North Carolina, and did well enough to get promoted into a job where I more or less had to enroll in a programming course at UNC. Not long after, the company made me a full-time programmer.

  In all of my wandering I stayed clear of New York. I thought the Apple would slam me to the pavement and squash me flat. Three years after I took the programming job, the software company relocated to New Brunswick, New Jersey. For the first time in my life I had a little money in the bank, and once I got to New Brunswick, New York started flashing and gleaming in the distance, beckoning me to the party. Two or three nights every month, I took the train to the city and stopped in at restaurants and jazz clubs. I went to a Beethoven piano recital by Alfred Brendel at Avery Fisher Hall and Robert Shaw’s Missa Solemnis at Carnegie Hall. I heard B. B. King and Phil Woods and one of Ella Fitzgerald’s last concerts. Eventually I started calling a few software outfits in New York, and two years after moving to New Jersey I got a better job, packed up, and went to the party.

  I had an apartment across from St. Mark’s Church on East Tenth Street and a decent job, and I was happier than ever before in my life. The right place turned out to be the one I’d been most afraid of all along, which sounded about right. On my birthdays, I called in sick and stayed in bed. And then, in the midst of my orderly life, I started getting this feeling about my mother.

  12

  It began as a kind of foreboding. A few months after moving to New York, I telephoned Aunt Nettie to ask if she had heard anything from Star. No, she said, how about you? I told her I’d been worried and gave her my number. “That girl, she’s made out of iron,” Nettie said. “Instead of fretting about your mother, you ought to worry about yourself for a change.”

  I told myself that Nettie would call me if anything serious happened. Nettie loved disaster, she would sound any necessary alarm. But what if Star had not alerted her? I called Aunt Nettie again. She told me that my mother was in East Cicero, “whoopin’ it up,” she said, “with two old rascals.” I asked her for Star’s telephone number, but Nettie had lost it and could not remember the names of the two old rascals. They owned a nightclub, but she couldn’t remember its name, either.

  “It’s no difference,” she said. “Star is going to let us know if she needs help, and if anything happens to us, she won’t have to be told to get here as fast as she can. She’ll just know. A streak of second sight runs through the Dunstans, and Star has her share. You do, too, I think.”

  “Second sight?” I asked. “That’s news to me.”

  “You don’t know beans about your own family, that’s why. They say no one would play cards with my father because he could see what they had in their hands.”

  “You don’t really believe that,” I said.

  She gave a soft, knowing laugh. “You’d be surprised at some of the things I believe.”

  One night I dreamed that I crawled into my mother’s bed on Cherry Street and heard her mutter a name or word that sounded like “Rinehart.” Part of the dream’s experience was the awareness that I was dreaming, and part of my awareness was of replaying a moment from childhood. My worries subsided again, though the underlying anxiety surfaced when I was alone in my apartment, especially if I was doing something that reminded me of her, like washing the dishes or listening to Billie Holiday on WBGO. At the start of the third week in May, I asked for all my accumulated sick leave on the grounds of a family emergency. My boss told me to take as much time as I needed and keep in touch. I started shoving things into my duffel bag as soon as I got home.

  I didn’t think I was going anywhere in particular. It never occurred to me that under the pressure of anxiety, I was reverting to my old, self-protective pattern. At the same time, as I said before, I knew exactly where I was going and why. At the moment Star was boarding the Greyhound, I was in the cab of a Nationwide Paper sixteen-wheeler bound for Flagstaff, enjoyably discussing the condition of African Americans in the United States with its driver, Mr. Bob Mims, and my defenses collapsed and the truth rushed in. Star had used the last of her strength to get herself home, and I was going there to be with her when she died. Once Bob Mims found out why I wanted to get to Edgerton, he veered from his normal route to take me to the Motel Comfort south of Chicago on the interstate.

  After an hour of waving my thumb at the side of the highway, I checked in to the motel. All the car-rental agencies were closed for the night. I went to the bar and started talking to a young assistant D.A. from Louisville named Ashleigh Ashton who was on maybe her second sea breeze. When she spelled her name and asked if I thought it was (a) pretentious and (b) too cute for a prosecutor, the drink in front of her seemed more likely to have been her third. If she didn’t like the way defendants grinned when they heard her name, I said, she should grin back and put ’em away. That was a pretty good idea, she said, would I like to hear another one?

  Whoops, I thought, three for sure, and said, “I have to get out of here pretty early.”

  “I do, too. Let’s leave. If I stay here any longer, one of these guys is going to jump me.”

  Sitting at the bar were two heavyweights with graying beards and biker jackets, a kid in a T-shirt reading MO’ BEER HERE, a couple of guys with chains around their necks and tattoos peeping out from under their short-sleeved sport shirts, and a specter in a cheap gray suit who looked like a serial killer taking a break from his life’s work. All of them were eyeing her like starving dogs.

  I walked her through what seemed a half mile of empty corridors. She gave me a quizzical, questioning look when she unlocked her door, and I followed her in. She said, “What’s your story anyhow, Ned Dunstan? I hate to bring it up, but your clothes look like you’ve been hitchhiking.”

  I gave her a short-form answer that implied that I had learned of my mother’s illness while hitchhiking for pleasure on a whim. “It was something I used to do when I was a kid,” I said. “I should have known better. If I had a car, I could get to Edgerton tonight.”

  “Edgerton? That’s where I’m going!” Suspicion rose into her eyes for a moment, and then she realized that I could not have known of her destination until she announced it. “If we’re still speaking to each other tomorrow morning, I could give you a ride.”

  “Why wouldn’t we be speaking to each other?”

  “I don’t know.” She raised her arms and looked wildly from side to side in only half a parody of extremity. “Don’t guys hate the idea of waking up beside someone they don’t know? Or get disgusted with themselves, because they think the woman’s cheap? It’s a mystery to me. I haven’t had sex in a year. Thirteen months, to be exact.”

  Ashleigh Ashton was a small, athletic-looking woman with short, shiny-blond hair and the face of a model for Windfoil parkas in an Eddie Bauer catalog. She had spent years proving to the men who took her for a cupcake that she was capable, smart, and tough.

  “Why is that?” I asked.

  “The charming process of getting divorced from my husband, I suppose. I found out he was screwing half his female clients.” An ironic light shone in her eye. “Guess what kind of practice he had.”

  “Divorce law.”

  She pressed her palm to her forehead. “Ashleigh, you’re a cliché! Anyhow, I asked you those questions because I’m thinking about going back to my maiden name. Turner. Ashleigh Turner.”

  “Good idea,” I said. Her divorce was probably no more than a week old. “The bad boys won’t smirk at you. But if you weren’t looking to get picked up, why did you go to the bar?”

  “I thought I was waiting for you.” She glanced away, and the corner of her mouth curled up. “Sal and Jimmy asked me on a tour
of their favorite Sinatra bars. The kid in the beer shirt, Ray, invited me into his room to do coke. He has a lot of coke with him, and he’s on his way to Florida. Isn’t that the wrong way around? Don’t people go to Florida to get the stuff and bring it back here? Those bikers, Ernie and Choke, wanted…. Forget what they wanted, but it sure would have been adventurous.”

  “If Ray wants to make it to Florida, he better not hustle Ernie and Choke,” I said.

  She snickered, then looked chagrined. “I’m in this stupid mood.”

  “Did your divorce just come through?”

  This time, she pressed both hands over her eyes. “Okay, you’re perceptive.” She lowered her arms and turned in a complete circle. “I knew that, I really did.”

  She sat on the edge of the bed and took off her nice lady-lawyer shoes. “The other reason I’m in a funny mood is that I can see my case going down the drain. Now that I’m being indiscreet, you’ve probably heard of the guy we’re after. He’s one of Edgerton’s leading citizens.”

  “Probably not,” I said. “I left when I was a kid.”

  “His name is Stewart Hatch. Tons of money. His family sort of runs Edgerton, from what I hear.”

  “We didn’t move in those circles.”

  “You should be grateful, but I’ll never understand why a guy with so much going for him would decide to turn into a crook.” She efficiently buttoned herself out of her pin-striped suit.

  About a quarter to six in the morning, I jumped out of bed before I was fully awake. Nettie’s sixth sense was operating at full strength. The only thought in my head was that whatever was going to happen to my mother was rushing toward her, it was already on the way, and I had to get to Edgerton in a hurry. Still foggy, I fumbled around for my clothes and saw a naked woman on the disarranged sheets. One of her legs was drawn up, as if in midstride. Her name came back to me, and I put a hand on her shoulder. “Ashleigh, wake up, it’s time to go.”

  She opened an eye. “Huh?”

  “It’s almost six. Something’s happening, and I have to get to Edgerton, fast.”

  “Oh, yeah. Edgerton.” She opened the other eye. “Goo’ morning.”

  “I’m going to take the world’s fastest shower, change clothes, and check out. Should I come back here to get you?”

  “Get me?” She smiled.

  “You’re still willing to give me a ride?”

  She rolled onto her back and stretched her arms. “Meet me outside. I’m sorry you had bad news.”

  A speedy shower and shave; a scramble into clean khakis, a blue button-down shirt, a lightweight blue blazer, loafers. I was going to see all my relatives, and for Star’s sake as well as my own, I wanted to look respectable.

  Hoping she would not make me wait more than twenty minutes, I carried my duffel and knapsack through the revolving door into the cool morning light and heard a female voice call my name. Across the parking lot, Ashleigh stood beside the open trunk of a blaze-red little car. She was wearing a trim navy blue suit that showed off her legs, and she looked as if she’d had maybe twice the time most people need to look the way she did.

  “Slowpoke,” she said.

  She sailed down the nearly empty highway at a comfortable sixty-five, fiddling with the radio and letting the occasional trucker blast on by. Neither one of us knew quite what to say to each other. She found a university FM station playing a mixture of hard bop and Chicago blues and let the digital counter stay where it was. “Did you call the hospital before you woke me up?”

  I said that I had not.

  “But you told me something happened to your mother. You didn’t get a call in my room, did you? I mean, I don’t really care, but …”

  But if you didn’t tell them you were in my room, how did they find you?

  “I guess I had a premonition.” She shot me a sidelong look. “Maybe it was just anxiety. I don’t know. I wish I could explain it better.”

  She glanced at me again. “I hope she’ll be all right.”

  “I’m just glad you were there.”

  “Well, I am, too,” she said. “I think you should probably go around the country giving hope to depressed women. And you were so tactful, you never made anything seem prearranged.”

  “Prearranged?”

  “Maybe not prearranged, but you know, from Chicago, with my law school friend, Mandy.”

  A sign announcing the approach of a highway restaurant and gas station floated toward us. I said, “Why don’t we pull in there and get something to eat?”

  The story emerged over breakfast. In the bar of a Chicago hotel, Mandy, the law school friend, had sent me a drink. When I left my chair to thank them, Mandy invited me to sit down. The conversation led to our various reasons for being in that hotel lobby on that particular evening, and I had mentioned that I was going to the southern part of the state late the next day and would probably spend the following night in another hotel. To Mandy’s chagrin, I had seemed more interested in Ashleigh Ashton than herself. Mandy knew that after working into the evening of the following day, Ashleigh would be driving south. She whisked her off to the bathroom and imparted worldly advice. Not long after, Ashleigh had inserted the Motel Comfort into our conversation, and I had expressed the hope of returning the favor and buying her a drink in whatever passed for a bar in the place if I wound up there, too.

  “I told Mandy you’d never show up, but she said, Go to the bar an hour or two after you check in, and he’ll find you. I wasn’t even sure it was you! In Chicago, you were wearing a suit, and here you had on jeans, but the more I looked at you, it was you. And you were so tactful, it was like you would have come anyhow, not just to meet me.”

  “I didn’t think you needed any more pressure,” I said.

  Apparently someone who looked a lot like me, a former Tulane teaching assistant named George Peters or the man for whom the woman in the old Denver airport had mistaken me, had been cruising the lobby of a Chicago hotel. No other rational explanation seemed possible. At the same time, the sheer unlikeliness of the coincidence prickled the hairs at the nape of my neck. If George Peters, or whatever his name was, had succeeded in setting up an assignation with Ashleigh, what had kept him from it?

  For the rest of the drive, a caffeine-enhanced Ashleigh maintained a steady sixty-five miles per hour while describing the misdeeds of her scoundrel millionaire. I made accommodating noises and pretended to listen.

  The sign at the first of the Edgerton exits read EDGERTON ELLENDALE. “Is this it?” she asked.

  “The next one,” I said.

  At the next sign, EDGERTON CENTER, she spun the little car off the highway. For a time we drove past hilly fields on a divided four-lane road and then, without transition, found ourselves in the wasteland of fast-food outlets, gas stations, motels, and strip malls at the fringes of most American cities. At the moment we passed a billboard welcoming us to EDGERTON, THE CITY WITH A HEART OF GOLD, the mild, sunlit air shimmered into a wavering veil like a heat mirage, then cleared again.

  “I have time to take you to the hospital, if that’s where you want to go,” she said.

  A stoplight turned red at an intersection bordered by two three-story red brick office buildings, a vacant lot, and a bar called The Nowhere Lounge. Below the street sign, a rectangular green placard pointed the way to St. Ann’s Community Hospital. “I think that’s the place,” I said.

  Four blocks later, she pulled up before the hospital entrance. I said, “Ashleigh …”

  “Don’t. You won’t have time to see me. I hope your mother gets better. If you were going to ask where I’m staying, it’s Merchants Hotel, wherever that is.”

  She stayed in the car while I took my bags from the trunk. I came up to kiss her goodbye.

  At the information desk, a woman told me that there was no patient named Star Dunstan, but that Valerie Dunstan was in intensive care. She gave me a green plastic visitor’s card and told me to make a right past the coffee shop, take the elevator to the third f
loor, and follow the signs.

  Numb with dread, I wandered through dingy hospital corridors until a nurse led me to a set of swinging doors and a plaque reading INTENSIVE CARE UNIT. I obeyed a sign hung over a basin and washed my hands, then pushed open another swinging door and carried my bags into a long, dimly lighted chamber lined with curtained-off cubicles around a brighter central station. From the counter in front of me, a nurse gave me the once-over a store detective aims at a potential shoplifter. Far down the length of the room Aunt Nettie and Aunt May were standing in front of one of the cubicles. They were heavier than I remembered them, and their hair had turned a pure, ethereal white.

  The nurse rolled her chair a half inch nearer the counter and asked, “May I help you?” An instantaneous, nonverbal exchange made it clear that I was not going to take another step until her authority had been acknowledged. The name tag pinned to her loose green staff shirt read L. ZWICK, R.N.

  “Dunstan,” I said. “Star Dunstan. Sorry, Valerie.”

  The nurse bent her head to examine a clipboard. “Fifteen.”

  Nettie was already surging toward me.

  13 Mr.X

  O Great Beings and Inhuman Ancestors!

  Only days before the prison walls of the academy’s eighth grade were to close around me, I came to a break in the woods and an overgrown field extending toward a road I did not know. On both sides of the field, the woods swept toward the road. Between the top of the field and the curve of the woods was a three-fourths-crumbled building of brick and stone. In a rubble of stone blocks at its center, the monolith of a fireplace reared into the air. At its far end, another chimney and a fire-blackened wall supported the remnants of a shingled roof extending over the remaining portion of the house. Beyond, bare joists dangled above empty space. The instant I beheld these remains, the hook in my entrails nearly yanked me off my feet, and a voice from within or without boomed, Come at last! Something like that. It might’ve been, You are here! Anyhow, the mighty voice informed me that we were getting down to brass tacks.