Dangerous Laughter

by Steven Millhauser

  On that last evening, when Mary Blessington waved to her in the dusk without really seeing her, Elaine Coleman was scarcely more than a shadow. She climbed the stairs to her room, locked the door as usual, put the milk in the refrigerator, and hung her coat over the back of a chair. Behind her the secondhand mirror barely reflected her. She heated the kettle and sat at the kitchen table, reading the paper and drinking a cup of tea. Had she been feeling tired lately, or was there a sense of lightness, of anticipation? In the bedroom she set her cup of tea down on a postcard on her nightstand and changed into her heavy white nightgown with its little blue flowers. Later, when she felt rested, she would make dinner. She pulled out the pillow and lay down with a book. Dusk was deepening into early night. In the darkening room she could see a shadowy nightstand, the sleeve of a sweater hanging on a chair, the faint shape of her body on the bed. She turned on the lamp and tried to read. Her eyes, heavy lidded, began to close. I imagined a not-unpleasant tiredness, a feeling of finality, a sensation of dispersion. The next day there was nothing but a nightgown and a paperback on a bed.

  It may have been a little different; one evening she may have become aware of what was happening to her, she may, in a profound movement of her being, have embraced her fate and joined forces with the powers of dissolution.

  She is not alone. On street corners at dusk, in the corridors of dark movie theaters, behind the windows of cars in parking lots at melancholy shopping centers illuminated by pale orange lamps, you sometimes see them, the Elaine Colemans of this world. They lower their eyes, they turn away, they vanish into shadowy places. Sometimes I seem to see, through their nearly transparent skin, a light or a building behind them. I try to catch their eyes, to penetrate them with my attention, but it’s always too late, already they are fading, fixed as they are in the long habit of not being noticed. And perhaps the police, who suspected foul play, were not in the end mistaken. For we are no longer innocent, we who do not see and do not remember, we incurious ones, we conspirators in disappearance. I too murdered Elaine Coleman. Let this account be entered in the record.

  THE ROOM IN THE ATTIC

  I

  WAKERS AND DREAMERS

  I FIRST SAW WOLF in March of junior year. This isn’t his story, but I suppose I ought to begin with him. I had slung myself into my seat with the careful nonchalance of which I was a master, and had opened my ancient brownish-red copy of The Mayor of Casterbridge, which held nothing of interest for me except the little threads of unraveling cloth along the bottom of the front cover, when I became aware of someone in the row on my right, two seats up. It was as if he’d sprung into existence a moment before. I was struck by his light gray suit—no one in our school wore a suit—and by the top of a paperback that I saw tugging down his left jacket pocket. I felt a brief pity for him, the new kid in the wrong clothes, along with a certain contempt for his suit and a curiosity about his book. He seemed to be studying the back of his left hand, though for a moment I saw him look toward the row of tall windows along the side of the room. One of them stood open, on this mild morning in 1959, held up by an upside-down flowerpot, and for some reason I imagined him striding across the room, pushing the window higher, and stepping through.

  When everyone was seated, Mrs. Bassick asked the new boy to stand up. It was an act he performed with surprising grace—a tall young man, sure of himself, unsmiling but at ease in his light gray suit, his hair curving back above his ears and falling in strands over his forehead, his long hands hanging lightly at his sides, as if it were nothing at all to stand up in a roomful of strangers with all eyes on you, or as if he simply didn’t care: John Wolfson, who had moved to our town from somewhere else in Connecticut, welcome to William Harrison High. He sat down, not quickly or clumsily as I would have done, and leaned back in an attitude of polite attention as class began. Five minutes later I saw his left hand slip into his jacket pocket and remove the paperback. He held it open on his lap during the rest of class.

  Later that day I passed him in the hall and saw that he had shed his jacket and tie. I imagined them hanging forlornly on a hook in his locker. The next day he appeared in a new set of clothes, which he wore with casual ease: chinos, scuffed black loafers with crushed-looking sides, and a light blue long-sleeved shirt with the cuffs rolled back twice over his forearms. I envied his ease with clothes; girls smiled at him; within a week we were calling him Wolf and feeling that he was part of things, as if he’d always been among us, this stranger with his amused gray eyes. Rumor had it that his father had been transferred suddenly from another part of Connecticut; rumor also had it that Wolf had flunked out of prep school or been thrown out for unknown reasons that seemed vaguely glamorous. He was slow-smiling, amiable, a little reserved. What struck me about him, aside from his untroubled way of fitting in, was the alien paperback I always saw among his schoolbooks. The book marked him. It was as if to say he’d gotten rid of the suit, but refused to go further. That, and the slight reserve you could feel in him, his air of self-sufficiency, the touch of mockery you sometimes felt in his smile—it all kept him from being simply popular. Sometimes it seemed to me that he had made an effort to look exactly like us, so that he could do what he liked without attracting attention.

  We fell into an uneasy friendship. I too was a secret reader, though I kept my books at home, in my room with the wide bookcase and the old living-room armchair with a sagging cushion. But that wasn’t the main thing. I thought of myself, in those days, as someone in disguise—beneath the obedient son, beneath the straight-A student, the agreeable well-brought-up boy with his friends and his ping-pong and his semiofficial girlfriend, there was another being, restless, elusive, mocking, disruptive, imperious, and this shadowy underself had nothing to do with that other one who laughed with his friends and went to school dances and spent summer afternoons at the beach. In a murky sense I felt that my secret reading was a way of burrowing down to that underplace, where a truer or better version of myself lay waiting for me. But Wolf would have none of it. “A book,” he declared, “is a dream-machine.” He said this one day when we were sitting on the steps of the town library, leaning back against the pillars. “Its purpose,” he said, “is to take you out of the world.” He jerked his thumb toward the doors of the library, where I worked for two hours a day after school, three days a week. “Welcome to the dream-factory.” I protested that for me a book was something else, something to get me past whatever was standing in my way, though I didn’t know what it was that was in my way or what I wanted to get to on the other side. “What gets in your way,” Wolf said, as if he’d thought about it before, “is all this”—he waved vaguely at Main Street. “Stores, houses, classrooms, alarm clocks, dinner at six, a sound mind in a healthy body. The well-ordered life.” He shrugged and held up a book. “My ticket out of here.” He gave that slow lazy smile of his, which had, I thought, a touch of mockery in it.

  He invited me to his house, one warm April day, when all the windows stood open and you could see out past the baseball field to the railroad tracks running behind it. We left together after school, I walking beside my bike as my books jumped in the dented wire basket, Wolf strolling beside me with a nylon jacket flung over one shoulder like a guy in a shirt ad and his books clutched at his hip. I lived in a newish neighborhood of ranch houses not far from the beach, but Wolf lived on the other side of town, out past the thruway, where the houses grew larger, the trees thicker and greener. We entered the shade of the thruway overpass, filled with the roar of eighteen-wheelers rumbling over our heads, then cut across a small park with slatted benches. After a while we found ourselves walking along a winding road, bordered by short brown posts with red reflectors. Here the houses were set far back from the street behind clusters of pine and oak and maple. At a driveway with a high wooden fence along one side and a high hedge on the other, we turned in and climbed a curving slope.

  Around the bend, Wolf’s house appeared. Massive and shadowy, it seemed to stand too close
to me as I bent my neck back to look up at the row of second-floor windows with their black shutters. The house was so dark that I was surprised to notice it was painted white; the sun struck through the high trees onto the clapboards in small bright bursts of white and burned on the black roof shingles.

  “Welcome to Wolfland,” he said—and raising his right arm, he moved his long hand in a slow, graceful flourish, shaped like a tilde.

  He opened the front door with a key and I followed him into a living room so gloomy that it felt as if heavy curtains had been closed across the windows. In fact the curtains were open and the windows held upward-slanted blinds that gave a broken view of sun-mottled branches. In the sunnier kitchen he tossed his books onto a table on which sat a gardening glove and an orange box of Wheaties, picked up a note that he read aloud—“Back later. Love, M”—and led me back into the living room, where a stairpost stood at the foot of a carpeted stairway. Upstairs we walked along a dusky hall with closed doors. Wolf stopped at the last one, which he opened by turning the knob and pushing with the toe of his loafer. Repeating his flourish, and adding a little bow, as if he were acting the part of a courtier paying homage to his lord, he waited for me to enter.

  I stepped into a dark brown sunless room with drawn shades. One of the shades was torn at the side, letting in a line of light. “Watch out,” Wolf said, “don’t move,” as he crossed the room to an old brass floor lamp with a fringed yellowish shade and pulled the chain. The light, dark as butterscotch, shone on an old armchair that sat in a corner and looked wrong in some way. But what struck me was the book-madness of the place—books lay scattered across the unmade bed and the top of a battered-looking desk, books stood in knee-high piles on the floor, books were crammed sideways and right side up in a narrow bookcase that rose higher than my head and leaned dangerously from the wall, books sat in stacks on top of a dingy dresser. The closet door was propped open by a pile of books, and from beneath the bed a book stuck out beside the toe of a maroon slipper.

  “Have a seat,” Wolf said, indicating the armchair, which I now saw was without legs. I sat down carefully in the low chair, afraid I might knock over the book piles that lay on the floor against each arm. Wolf yanked back the spread with its load of books, which went tumbling against the wall, and lay down on his back with his head against a pillow, one arm behind his neck and his ankles crossed. That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said that the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness, which was why the people who selected books for high school English classes were careful to choose only false books that were discussable, boring, and sane, or else, if they chose a real book by mistake, they presented it in a way that ignored everything great and mad about it. He said that high school was for morons and mediocrities. He said that his mother had agreed never to enter his room so long as he changed his sheets once a week. He said that books weren’t made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes. There were two kinds of people, he said, wakers and dreamers. Wakers had once had the ability to dream but had lost it, and so they hated dreamers and persecuted them in every way. He said that teachers were wakers. He spoke of writers I’d never heard of, writers such as William Prescott Pearson, A. E. Jacobs, and John Sharp, his favorite, who wrote terrific stories like “The Elevator,” about a man who one day enters an elevator in a fifty-six-story office building and never comes out except to use the public bathrooms and the food machines, and “The Infernal Roller Coaster,” about a roller coaster that goes up and up and never reaches the top, but whose masterpiece was a five-hundred-page novel that takes place entirely during the blink of an eye. Compared with these works, things like Silas Marner and The Mayor of Disasterbridge were about as interesting as newspaper supplements advertising vacuum cleaners.

  “Care to see the attic?” he said suddenly. In the warm cave of books I had half closed my eyes, but Wolf had risen from the bed and was already standing at the door. I followed him out into the dusk of the hall, past the top of the stairway, to an unpainted door that looked like the door of a linen closet. It opened to reveal a flight of wooden steps. Up we went into that hot attic, where tawny sunlight streamed through a small round window, fell against bare floorboards and splintery rafters, and weakened into a brown darkness. As we passed along, I made out old couches and bureaus and armchairs, as if we’d broken into the furniture department of a big-city store. Then we came to a high old-fashioned record cabinet, which rose up to my chest; Wolf opened the top to reveal a dim turntable, on which lay a ghostly white bear with outstretched arms. He next led me to a wooden wall with a door; it opened onto a short hall, with a door on each side. He stopped at the left-hand one, knocked lightly with a single knuckle, and bent forward as if to listen.

  “My sister’s room,” he then said, and ushered me in.

  When he closed the door behind us I found myself in total darkness. I had the sensation that Wolf was standing close to me, but I could not see him there. Then I felt something on my upper arm and jerked away, but it was only Wolf’s hand, guiding me. Slowly he moved me forward through the blackness, as I held up an arm as if to protect my face from branches in a forest. “Sit here,” he whispered. He placed my hand on what seemed to be the high back of an upholstered chair, with a row of metal buttons running across the top.

  I felt my way around the chair and sat down, while I sensed Wolf settling into another seat nearby. I was sitting in a straight-backed stiff chair with hard, upholstered arms, the sort of chair you might find in the ornate parlor of an aging actress in a black-and-white movie. “Isabel,” he said quietly, “are you awake?” I strained my eyes in that thick darkness, but I could see nothing at all. It struck me that it was all a hoax, an audacious joke meant to ridicule me in some way. At the same time I listened for the slightest sound and narrowed my eyes until they trembled with the effort to see. Anything could have been in that room.

  “She’s asleep,” Wolf said, and I thought: Perfect, a perfect trick. I imagined him looking at me with a superior smile.

  “Wolf?” a voice whispered, but so lightly that I wondered whether I had imagined it.

  “Isabel,” Wolf’s voice said. “Are you up? I brought a visitor.”

  Something stirred. I heard a sound as of bedclothes, and what seemed like a faint sigh, and somewhere in that darkness I heard the word “Hello.”

  “Say hello to Isabel,” Wolf said.

  “Hello,” I said, feeling irritable and absurd.

  “Tell her your name,” Wolf said quietly, as if I were a shy six-year-old child, and I would have said nothing, but who knew what was going on, there in the dark.

  “David,” I said. “Dave.”

  “Two names,” the voice said; there was more rustling. “Two are better than one.” I wondered whether Wolf had learned the trick of throwing his voice.

  “Do you like my name, David Dave?”

  I hesitated. “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

  “Uh-uh-uh,” she said playfully, and I imagined a finger wagging in the dark. “You had to think about it.”

  “But I do,” I said, thinking quickly. “I was listening to the sound of it, in my mind.”

  “Oh, that was a good answer, David Dave, a very good answer. I don’t believe you, not for a second, but I won’t make you pay a penalty, this time. So hey, how do you like my room? No no, don’t worry, just kidding. What’s Wolfie been telling you about me?”

  “Not too much, actually.”

  “Oh good, then you can make me up. Isabel, or The Mystery of the Haunted Chamber. Hoooo, I’m feeling tired. Will you come back and sit with me again, David Dave?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I will. Definitely.”

  I heard a long yawn, and a mumbled phrase that sounded like “See ya later, alligator,”
and then I felt Wolf’s hand on my arm and he was leading me out of the dark room and shutting the door carefully behind him. We walked in silence down the wooden steps and the carpeted steps into the gloom of the living room. Evidently it was time to go. Maybe he didn’t want me to question him about that little game of his, up there in the dark. If he wished to be enigmatic, that was fine with me.

  “She likes you,” he said at the front door, standing with his forearm up against the jamb and his other hand clasping his raised shoulder. He lowered his voice to say, “Don’t worry about anything.” “Okay,” I said, “I won’t,” and walked down the front steps to my bike, with its dented wire basket filled with books. I kicked up the stand, swung my leg over the seat, and gave a wave as I started down the winding drive. At the bend I glanced back at the house, rising in a kind of twilight, then whipped around to watch the shade-darkened drive as I rushed downhill between the high fence and the hedge, and when I burst onto the street I had to tighten my eyes in the sudden harsh light of the afternoon sun.

  II

  ADVENTURES IN THE DARK

  All the way home, along hot streets printed with the curved shadows of telephone wires, I saw the high dark house, the cave of books, the black chamber. It all reminded me of something, and as I rode through the shade of the thruway overpass and broke into the sun it came to me: the darkness of the movie theater, the sun-striped lobby, the emergence into the glare of a summer afternoon. I had always liked that moment of confusion, when your mind is possessed by two worlds at once: the hard sidewalk with its anthills and its silver gum wrapper, the sword-fight in the high room with the crimson curtain. But soon the grainy sidewalk, the brilliant yellow fire hydrant, the flash of sun on the fender of a passing car, the jewel-green traffic light, become so vivid and exact that the other pictures grow dim, and you can hardly summon up the vague dark house, the book piles on the floor, the dim voice in the dark. I had the feeling that if I turned my bike around and rode back I’d find nothing at all—only a winding road lined with trees and a few dark posts with red reflectors.