Dangerous Laughter

by Steven Millhauser

  At home I greeted my mother in the sunny kitchen, where she held up her hands to show me her flour-covered fingers and smoothed back a lock of hair with the back of a wrist. In my room I tossed my books on the bed and slumped down next to them with my neck against the wall and my legs dangling over the side. My wooden bookcase, painted a shiny gray, filled me with irritation. Here and there among the books were spaces given over to other things—old board games, a wooden box of chess pieces with a sliding top, two collections of stamps, a varnished bowl I had made in woodshop in the seventh grade. On top was my display of minerals, each with its label, and then came a globe on a brass stand, an electric clock with a visible cord, and a radiometer with vanes spinning in the light. Even the books exasperated me: they stood in neat rows, held tightly in place by green metal bookends with cork-lined bases.

  On the beige wall and part of my bureau, long stripes of sunlight, thrown from the open slats of my blinds, lay tipped at an angle.

  That night I woke in the dark. But I saw at once that it wasn’t dark: light from a streetlamp glimmered on the globe, on the leather edges of the blotter on my desk, on the metal curve of the shade of the floor lamp beside my reading chair. Suddenly I thought: The attic was empty, no one was there—and I fell asleep.

  The next day I saw Wolf in English, French, and American History. I passed him twice in the halls, saw him leaving the cafeteria as I entered, and spoke with him briefly after school, checking my watch as we stood on a plot of brownish grass near the bridge that crossed the railroad tracks and led to the center of town. I had to get over to the library and work my two-hour shift. Wolf stood smoking a cigarette with his thumb hooked in his belt and his eyes narrowed against the updrifting bluish smoke. He said nothing about his house, nothing about Isabel, and as I walked down toward Main Street I felt a ripple of anger, as if something had been taken away from me. I could forgive the deception but not the silence. On the second floor of the library, where I stood removing books from a metal cart and studying the white Dewey decimal numbers on the back before placing the books on the shelves, I recalled his book-mad room and wondered whether I had fallen asleep there, in that stumpy armchair, and dreamed my visit to his invisible sister.

  It was like that for the rest of the week: a few meetings in class, a few words after school. It was as if he’d invited me on an adventure and changed his mind. I felt like the victim of an unpleasant joke and vowed to stay out of his way. That weekend I set up my ping-pong table in the garage and called up my friends Ray and Dennis. My mother brought out glasses of lemonade heavy with ice cubes and we ate fistfuls of pretzel sticks and ran after the white ball as it rolled down the driveway toward the street, where kids from next door were playing Wiffle ball with a yellow plastic bat and a man with a strap around his waist stood leaning away from the top of a telephone pole. Afterward we sat on the screened back porch and played canasta on the green card table. On Monday I worked again at the library, and on Tuesday, a day off, Wolf invited me to his house.

  It was still there at the top of the curving drive, less dark than I had remembered it, the clapboards distinctly white in the broken shade of the pines and Norway maples. As we walked through the living room toward the stairs, a tall handsome woman in khaki Bermuda shorts and a white halter entered from the kitchen, carrying a trowel in one hand and wearing on the other a grass-stained glove. I saw at once that she was Wolf’s mother—saw it by something in the cheekbones, in the eyes, in the air of careless authority with which she inhabited her body. She thrust the trowel into the gardening glove, reached out her long bare hand, and shook hands firmly. “I’m John’s mother,” she said. For a moment I wondered who John was. “Sorry for the mess. You must be David.”

  “He is, and then again he isn’t,” Wolf said, and throwing an arm across her shoulders he added, “What mess?” As she turned to him with a look of loving exasperation, she raised the back of her hand to her temple and smoothed away a piece of dark hair—and suddenly I imagined a world of mothers with hands dipped in work, raising their wrists gracefully to smooth back their hair.

  In his room with the drawn shades he sat in the legless armchair with his feet up on the bed, while I lay across the bed with my neck against the wall, one foot on the floor and one ankle resting on my knee. He spoke only about Isabel. She was shy, extremely shy—hence the meeting in the dark. Whenever she met someone new—an ordeal she preferred to avoid—she insisted on the condition of absolute darkness. Thick curtains hung over the windows of the attic room. But don’t worry—when she got to know me better, when she got used to me, he was sure she’d come out of the dark. Besides, she didn’t only stay in her room—sometimes she came down for dinner or walked around the house. It was only strangers who made her nervous. He appreciated my willingness to visit her, she needed to see people, god did she need to see people, though not just any old moronic people. As soon as he’d met me, he’d been sure. Truth was, about a year ago she’d had some kind of—well, they called it a breakdown, though in his opinion her nervous system had discovered a brilliant way of allowing her to do whatever she wanted without having to suffer the boredom of good old high school and all the rest of the famous teenage routine. She hadn’t attended school for the last year, but the board of education had allowed her to study at home and take the tests in her room. She was much more studious than he was, always memorizing French irregular verbs and the parts of earthworms. She was a year younger than we were. He himself would love to have a nice little breakdown, to use that word, though frankly he’d prefer to call it a fix-up, but he suffered from an embarrassing case of perfect health, he couldn’t even manage to catch a cold, something must be wrong with him.

  Wolf reached under his chair, brought up a pack of cigarettes, and held it out to me with raised eyebrows. He shrugged, thrust one into his mouth, and lit up. “It all depends on how you define health,” he said. He drew the smoke deep into his lungs and, raising his chin so that his face was nearly horizontal, blew a slow stream of smoke toward the ceiling. When he was done he raised a shade, opened the window, and made little brushing motions with his hands toward the screen. He blew at the screen with short quick bursts of breath. Then he shut the window and jerked down the shade.

  He turned to face me, leaning back against the window frame with his hands in his pockets and his ankles crossed.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?” he asked.

  It wasn’t a question I was expecting. “Yes and no,” I finally said.

  “Brilliant answer,” Wolf said, with his slow lazy smile. He pushed with his shoulders against the window frame and stood up. “Shall we?” He nodded toward the door.

  I followed him up the wooden steps into the sun-streaked dark attic. In the little hall he whispered, “She’s expecting you.” At the last door he knocked with his hand held sideways, using a single knuckle. He opened the door—in the dim light of the hall I caught sight of the edge of a bureau with a shadowy hairbrush on top—and a moment later I was in utter darkness. He led me to the high-backed chair, and as I sat upright against the stiff back and gripped the chair arms, I felt like the wooden carving of a king.

  “Welcome, stranger,” the voice said. It seemed to be coming from a few feet away, as if from someone sitting up in bed. “What brings you to these parts?” I had the feeling that Wolf was staring at me in the dark.

  “I was looking for the post office,” I said.

  “This here’s the ’lectric company, mister,” Isabel said.

  The black room, the stiff chair, the word “’lectric,” the sense that I was being tested in some way, all this made me break into a sharp, nervous laugh.

  I could feel Wolf rising from his chair. “I’ll be in my room. Just ring if you need anything.” I heard his footsteps on the rug. The door opened and closed quickly.

  “Did he say ‘ring’?”

  “I’ve got a bell.”

  “Oh—your Isa-bell.”

  “Do you always make jokes
?”

  “Only in the dark.”

  “And when it gets light?”

  “Dead serious.”

  “Lucky it’s dark. Let’s play a game.”

  “In the dark?”

  “You’ll see.”

  I tried to imagine some mad game of Monopoly, in which you had to select your piece by touch, trying to distinguish the ship from the car, then rolled the dice across an invisible board and carefully felt their smooth sides to find the slightly recessed dots. I was wondering how I might contrive to move my piece along an unseen board when I felt something soft against my fingers and snatched my hand away.

  “Here,” Isabel said. “Tell me what it is. You can only use one hand.”

  I reached out my hand and felt a soft pressure against the palm. I closed my fingers over something furry or fuzzy and roundish, with a hardness under the fur. On one side the fur gave way to a smoothness of cloth. It felt familiar, this roundish furryish thing about the size of my palm, but though I kept turning it over and stroking it with my thumb, I couldn’t figure it out.

  “Give up?” she said. “Actually, I should have told you—it’s part of something.”

  “Is it part of a stuffed animal?”

  “Well, no. Close. Actually—you’ll kill me—it’s an earmuff. It came off that metal thing that goes over your head.”

  She next passed me an object that was hard and thin and cool, which immediately shaped itself against my fingers as a teaspoon.

  “That was way too easy,” I said.

  “Well, I felt guilty. Try this one.”

  It was small and curved, with a clip of some sort attached to it, and suddenly I knew: a barrette. There followed a hard leathery object that was easy—an eyeglass case—and then a mysterious cloth strip with tassels that turned out to be a bookmark, and then a papery spongy object with a string attached that I triumphantly identified as a tea bag. Once, as she passed me a small glass object, I felt against the underside of my fingers the light pressure of her fingertips. And once, after a pause in which I heard sounds as of shifting cloth, she let fall into my outstretched hand a longish piece of fabric that she immediately snatched away, saying “That wasn’t fair,” bursting into a laugh at my protest, and refusing to identify it, even as I imagined her slipping back into a shirt or pajama top.

  After the touching game she asked me to describe my room. I told her about my bookcase, my armchair with the sagging cushion, and my wall lamp that could be pulled out on a fold-up metal contraption, but she kept asking for more details. “I can’t see anything,” she said, sounding exasperated. I tried to make her see the X-shaped crosspieces of the unfolding wall lamp over my bed, and then I described, with fanatical care, the six-sided quartz crystal, the pale purple fluorite crystal in the shape of a tetrahedron, and the amethyst geode in my mineral collection. When it was her turn, she described a cherrywood box on her desk, with four compartments. One held a small pouch of blue felt tied with leather thongs and containing a silver dollar and an Indian-head penny, the second held a pair of short red-handled scissors, the third a set of tortoiseshell barrettes, and the fourth a small yellowish ivory figurine, a Chinese sage seated with his legs crossed and holding an open book in his lap. One of his hands was broken off at the wrist, he wore a broad-brimmed conical hat, the ivory pages of the book were wavy—and as she described the ivory man in the compartment of the cherrywood box, I seemed to see, taking shape in the darkness, a faint and tremulous Chinese sage, hovering at the height of my head.

  We were playing Ghost when I was startled by a knock at the door. Quickly the door opened and closed; I was aware of a momentary change in the quality of blackness but saw nothing. “It’s nearly five-thirty,” Wolf said—he knew I was expected home by six. “See you, stranger,” Isabel said as Wolf led me toward the door. Downstairs I greeted his mother, who was standing in the living room with her arms reaching up to the top of a drooping curtain. When she turned to look at me, keeping one hand on the curtain and waving the fingers of her other hand, I saw that her mouth was full of safety pins.

  I now began to visit Wolf’s house after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when I was free of the library, and on weekend afternoons. I would climb the stairs to Wolf’s room, where we talked for a while, and then he would rise from the chair or bed very slowly, as if he were being tugged back by a tremendous force, and lead me up to the attic. At the door of Isabel’s room he knocked with one knuckle, lightly, twice. Without waiting for a reply, he held open the door and closed it quickly behind me before returning to his room. If he cared that I was spending less time with him than with his sister, he never showed it. If anything, he seemed eager for me to visit her—it was as if he thought I might cure her in some way. Exactly what it all meant I didn’t know, couldn’t care. I knew only that I needed to visit Isabel, to be with her in that room. The darkness excited me—I could feel it seize me and draw me in. Everything in me seemed to quicken there.

  The darkness, the hidden face, the secret room, the unseeing of Isabel—it all soon came to feel as much a part of her as her voice. If I tried to picture her, I saw a wavering shadowy image that hardened gradually into a tall girl in Bermuda shorts, holding a trowel. Sometimes, before she faded away, I saw gray, amused eyes—Wolf’s eyes. She loved games, all sorts of games, and it occurred to me that one thing we were doing in that room was playing the game of darkness. She was like a child who closes her eyes, stretches out her arms, and pretends to be blind. For all I knew, she might really be blind—she might really be anything. Whatever she was, I had to go there, to the dark at the top of the house.

  In one of our kitchen drawers, the one to the right of the silverware drawer, there were two flashlights, a regular one and a very small one, the size of a fountain pen. One day not long after my first visit, I slipped the small flashlight into my pocket and carried it with me into the darkness of Isabel’s room. My plan was to take it out during one of our games, fiddle with it, and shine it suddenly and briefly, as if by accident, at Isabel. She would spring into existence—at last!—if only for a second, before vanishing into the hidden world. I would apologize and we would continue as before.

  As I sat in the stiff chair, holding the little flashlight and listening to Isabel tell me about a new word game she’d invented, I kept waiting for the right moment. I could hear her shifting in the bed—I imagined her moving her arms about as she talked. Then I imagined her sleeves, perhaps pajama sleeves, slipping back along her gesturing forearms. At that instant my desire to see her, to strip her of darkness, became so ferocious that I raised my fingertips to my throat and felt the thudding of my blood. I imagined her startled eyes, brilliant with fear. It seemed to me that to shine the light at Isabel, to expose her to my greedy gaze, would be like tearing off her clothes. With a feeling of shame, of sorrow, and of something that felt like gratitude, I returned the light to my pocket.

  And settling into the chair, as the afternoon’s deep night flowed into me, I wondered at my ignorance; for I saw that what held me there was the darkness, the lure of an unseen, mysterious world.

  Meanwhile, in the unmysterious world outside Wolfland, I burst out laughing in the cafeteria, raised my hand in American History, banged my locker shut. I shelved books in the library, drank cherry Cokes at Lucy’s Luncheonette, and went miniature golfing on Friday nights with Ray and Dennis, while cars rolled by on the Post Road with their windows open and tough-looking boys with slicked-back hair slapped their hands on car tops to blasts of rock ’n’ roll. At every moment I felt invaded by Isabel, but at the same time I had trouble remembering her exactly, in the world beyond her room. The sunlit realm kept threatening to make a ghost of her, or to erase her entirely, and I began to look forward to the coming of night, when she grew more vivid in my mind.

  One Saturday morning as I was walking in town, on my way to buy a birthday card for a girl in my French class, I was shocked to see Isabel strolling out of Mancini’s drugstore. Her dark hair, cut
short, was held back by a glossy barrette, and her short-sleeved white blouse was tucked into her jeans, which were rolled up to midcalf. A navy-blue pocketbook, slung over her left shoulder, kept bumping against her right hip. Although I knew that Isabel never left her house, that I had allowed a scattering of details, which must have been collecting in my mind, to attach themselves to this stranger strolling out of Mancini’s drugstore, still my heart beat hard, my breath came quick, and not until later that afternoon, when I climbed the wooden stairs, did I grow calm in the rich blackness of Isabel’s chamber.

  Sometimes when I sat with her in the dark I wondered whether she was deformed in some way. I imagined a twisted mouth, a smashed nose, a mulberry birthmark spreading like a stain across her face. As a ghost-swarm of ugly Isabels rose in my mind, I felt repelled not so much by the images as by something in myself that was creating them, and as if in protest another kind of Isabel began to appear, blue-eyed Isabels and smiling Isabels, Isabels in red shorts, Isabels in faded jeans with a dark blue patch in back where a pocket had torn off, Isabels in white bathing suits wiping their glistening arms with beach towels, until my brain was so filled with false Isabels that I pressed my hands against the sides of my head, as if to crush them to death.

  One night I thought: The blackness is a poison that soaks into my skin and makes me insane. During these seizures I have delusions that I call Isabel. The thought interested me, excited me, as if I had found the solution to a difficult problem in trigonometry, but as the night wore on, the idea grew less and less interesting until it left me feeling bored and indifferent.