"Where are you taking me?" David interrupted.
"To my apartment. It’s not far. Are you getting tired? We can stop. We can sit right here on the street if you’d like."
David thought this was an odd question. Did people actually get tired here? What a ludicrous idea. He answered, "No. I’m not tired." He paused. "My head hurts."
"Hurts?"
"Yes. I have . . . a headache."
"I don’t understand. Headache?"
"You don’t know what pain is?"
The man shrugged. "I’ve seen the word used. I don’t know what it means. No one does."
David stopped walking. "No one here experiences pain?"
The thin man was still walking. He stopped, looked back. David could see nothing beneath the darkness that covered his face. "I don’t know if they do or don’t," the man said. "I don’t know what pain is. I think that I would surely like to know what pain is, I think that would be stimulating, and I think I would be enlightened—"
David shook his head quickly, in sudden frustration and anger. "When you fall down . . . when someone falls down and hits his elbow on the street—"
"No one falls down," the man said, and David could hear amusement in his tone.
"Do you mean that everyone is the soul of grace here? No one stumbles? No one has an accident? No one falls off a roof, or cuts his finger, or . . . or falls down?"
"Perhaps they do," the man said. "But if they do, then I haven’t heard of it. And I like to keep track of things, you know. I think that I would have heard if anyone had fallen off a roof. But, of course, no one gets up on roofs to begin with. What reason would there be?" He chuckled. "It’s a silly idea, getting up on a roof—I think I would have heard of that too—"
David—his anger and frustration mounting—said nothing as the man continued his monologue. David had merely wanted to know if what he had suspected for so long—that death was the end of pain and suffering—was true. But, ironically, this man, a resident of this place, could tell him almost nothing.
At last, David rushed forward and slapped the man hard across the face. The man stumbled backward a few feet, looked as if he were about to fall, regained his balance. His hand went up. He stood very still; his hand, where it connected to his wrist, lost itself in the darkness that covered his face.
"I’m sorry," David said. "I didn’t want to do that. I had to."
The man said nothing.
David said, "Do you feel anything?" He paused. "I do." The palm of his hand ached from the blow.
The darkness that was the man’s face moved up and down once, then again. He was nodding, David realized. But the man said nothing.
"What do you feel?" David coaxed.
The darkness moved left to right, right to left.
The man was shaking his head. "I don’t know how I feel."
"It’s called pain," David said.
"Is it?" The thin man’s interest was piqued. "How very like a dream it is. How very much as if it is something I’ve experienced before. Often. This is very stimulating." He paused. "Can you do that again?"
"Hit you again?"
"Yes. I want you to. Hit me again."
"I can’t. I was provoked before. I can’t hit you again. I haven’t got any reason to hit you again. It’s not why I came here."
The man said nothing for a moment. Then he turned his body toward the wooden wall of the building near him and, without preamble, threw himself hard against it, so he hit it with his chest and his face. He bounced off the building and then onto his backside on the brick street. He sat very still. He said nothing.
David walked over to him and tried hard to peer into the darkness around his face. He saw, once more, the suggestion of large eyes and a wide nose, but this was a suggestion only, as if, again, these were features that David expected to see.
"Are you all right?" David asked.
The man said nothing.
"Are you hurt?" David asked.
"Hurt?" the man said. "I can’t say. I don’t know." He was clearly puzzled.
David reached for the man’s hand to help him up.
"Volvo wagon," the man said.
David didn’t understand. "Sorry?"
The man screamed the words, "Volvo wagon!" He screamed them again; there was anguish in his tone, now. "Volvo wagon! Volvo wagon!"
David backed away.
The man continued screaming the words "Volvo wagon!"
Some people appeared from the quirky houses that lined the street. They stood in their doorways, or stuck their heads out of windows and watched the man screaming "Volvo wagon!"
Eventually, all at once, the man stopped screaming and fell silent.
The people went back into their houses, or pulled their heads back into windows.
The man stood. "It’s not far," he said. "But I think that the darkness will be coming soon, so we must hurry."
"Why were you yelling ‘Volvo wagon’?" David asked.
The man answered, "I don’t know."
"Do you know what it is?"
"What what is?"
"A Volvo wagon."
"No. What is it?"
"It’s a kind of car."
"A car? I don’t know what a car is."
"It’s a means of transportation. Like a plane or a boat. Do you know what they are?"
"No. And I don’t know what transportation is.”
“Your feet are a means transportation."
"My feet? Is that what a Volvo wagon is? My feet?"
"No. A Volvo wagon is a kind of car. A means of transportation."
"Like my feet?"
"Yes."
"Then I don’t know why I would be yelling ‘Volvo wagon.’ I know what my feet are. I should have been yelling ‘My feet!’"
David sighed.
The sky was darkening quickly.
David said, "You don’t have the faintest idea what I’m talking about, do you?"
"No," the thin man said. "But I want to." He paused. "We have to hurry."
"Why?" David asked.
"Because if we don’t, then we will surely be swallowed up by the darkness."
~ * ~
It’s ten years later, and Peter, the man who has moved into the house that once belonged to Anne Case, says to his wife, Maude, "Have you seen any more of our friend with the big head and bulbous eyes?" Peter is smiling as he says it, but he supposes that Maude can’t see him smile because they’re lying in bed and the light is off.
There’s a moment’s silence, then Maude says, "No." A short pause. "I’ve decided that I really didn’t see anything."
"Oh?"
"Or perhaps if I did see something . . ." A pause. A sigh. "I’ve given this a lot of thought, Peter, and I’ve decided that if I did see something then it was probably not a man at all. I think it would have to have been a woman." A pause, "The woman who lived here. Anne Case." Another pause. She had been on her side, facing away from her husband. She rolled to her back. "And because she was murdered . . . I mean, that’s quite traumatic, isn’t it?"
"Quite."
"So, as traumatic as it was, her spirit is forever earthbound. Tied for an eternity to this house, to the place where she was murdered. Unable to find peace. It’s very sad, Peter, but it’s probably happened a million times. Someone dies violently and their soul simply can’t . . . pass over. To the other side, I mean."
"Why?"
"Why? It’s obvious, isn’t it? I shouldn’t have to tell you why." A short pause. "And when I saw her, I simply . . . misinterpreted what I was seeing. It’s not every day you see a ghost, so I guess I was a little shaken by it. The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than two or three seconds, anyway. One moment he was there and the next moment he . . . she . . . whatever, was gone."
"Poof!"
"Yes. Poof!"
TEN
The elderly man—a widower—lived by himself on Sylvan Beach, in a three-bedroom cottage that he and his late wife had shared for twenty years,
ever since their retirement from the motel business.
The car that was stopped ahead of him on the narrow dirt road looked familiar. He thought he remembered seeing it a couple of times in the past few weeks; it wasn’t easy to miss. Most people in the area drove big American cars. This was a Toyota. Blue. Sparkling in the late afternoon sun.
He stopped his car a couple of feet behind the Toyota. He could see the back of the driver’s head—a crown of dark hair sticking not far above the headrest. He thought he remembered seeing this driver, too, once or twice at the Sylvan Beach Grocery. She was the only woman in the area who had such a crown of black hair.
Why was she stopped here? he wondered. Perhaps her car wouldn’t start. Perhaps she had just braked for an animal—the area was a popular crossing for all kind of animals; feral cats, dogs, deer, woodchucks, opossums—and the road, in summer, was often littered with their dead bodies. Perhaps she had actually hit something and was in shock behind the wheel of her Toyota.
The elderly man was in a quandary as to what to do. There wasn’t a lot of room to maneuver around the Toyota, and he didn’t want to honk his horn for fear of seeming rude. If someone came up behind him, he’d explain the situation and hope that they would be as patient as he was. But it was unlikely that anyone would come along. The road was not much used this time of year because most of the cottages on the lake were seasonal. The summer people weren’t due to show up for a couple of months.
He waited for a minute, two minutes, five minutes. It was not an inordinately long amount of time for him to wait. He often relinquished his place in various lines (at theaters and grocery stores and the motor vehicle department) to people who looked as if they were in a much bigger hurry than he was—or told him they were—and had waited sometimes fifteen minutes or a half hour longer than he otherwise would have. So, five minutes was nothing. But, still, this woman sitting so quietly in her car was something of a puzzle. She might be hurt. She might have had some kind of attack. Maybe she was simply daydreaming and would get moving soon enough.
~ * ~
The thin man opened the front door to his apartment house and held it so David could go in.
But David did not go in. He wasn’t sure he trusted this man, or that he trusted anything, here. This place was simply too real. It should have been illusory, it should have been more like a dream; the streets he walked here should have been malleable beneath—brick or asphalt or stone, these streets should have felt like sand or water beneath his feet; but they were solid and unyielding; and the buildings were hard-edged and well delineated against the ever-changing sky. They, like the sky, should have changed, however subtly, with each passing second. This was, after all—as he had always believed—only a land of dreams, no more than a place where fantasies were allowed to come true, where childhoods were relived and relived again, where the best and happiest moments of a billion different completed lives were replayed endlessly.
This was a place of reward, a place of rest and peace and harmony. It existed only because its inhabitants allowed it to exist.
"Go in," invited the thin man, gesturing with his hand toward the inside of the apartment building. "It may not be heaven, but it’s home."
David shook his head. "I can’t. I’m afraid."
The man shook his head. David saw only the darkness framing it move. "I don’t understand what afraid is. I want to, certainly."
David did not answer him. Christian, he realized at once, had been right. His first visit here, five years ago, when he had nearly drowned, had really shown him almost nothing. He had seen so very little of this place, and his fantasies had filled in what he had not seen. He had devised a clever, enticing fiction, a heaven of his own making, a heaven, an afterlife—whatever you wanted to call it—that would have pleased him. And it apparently had nothing to do with reality.
This was reality.
This squat brick apartment building, this thin man who talked almost ceaselessly and whose face was covered in darkness, these hard streets, this always-changing sky, this strange little city whose houses seemed to have been built from memories that were incomplete.
Here, he was the ghost, he was the one who was unreal, he was the fantasy.
"Go in," the man said again. "And don’t be afraid. There are no ghosts." A brief pause. "There I go again. Ghosts. Who knows what ghosts are? It’s like forever, isn’t it? And . . . and microwave, Reddenbacher, World War One, all little snippets of nothing, motes of dust—"
Beyond the front door, there were dark stairs and a darker hallway.
"Are we going up?" David asked, interrupting the thin man’s monologue.
"We’re going to have some tea," said the man. "Our walk has made me very thirsty."
~ * ~
A dog ran loose on the rocky beach of Oneida Lake, near the Sylvan Beach Road. The dog was lost. The night before, she had chased a rabbit into the fields near her home and then, because her sense of smell was not what a dog’s sense of smell should be, she had not been able to find her way back.
The dog was small, white, skittish. Her owners called her "Tootie." Every few moments, she glanced over her shoulder. She was looking for two things—her owners, and other dogs that roamed freely in the area. Two of those dogs had chased her until her lungs were close to bursting.
ELEVEN
Karen read:
Dearest Anne,
Do you know what I give to the world when I’m writing? I give it myself. It’s that simple. I go inside myself and I pull out all the creatures that exist there, all the passions, all the desperation to be real, all the good and evil, and I make people out of them to populate the books that I write.
And so, dear Anne, I have come to realize the necessity of self-knowledge, and the real danger in self-ignorance, the enormous treachery of keeping our inner and outer selves separate.
We cannot for long safely allow our demon inner selves expression only in our dreams.
You understand that too well because you are the person you
The letter ended there. It was written in black fountain pen; many of the upstrokes and downstrokes were obscured by flares of ink.
I shouldn’t have been snooping, Karen thought, and tucked the unfinished letter back into the copy of Christian’s first novel, Greed, where she had found it.
She closed her eyes, felt tears starting. My God, he’d never mentioned having had a relationship with Anne Case. Not once. Her name had hardly passed his lips except in conversation with David.
The implications of what she was thinking astounded her. Frightened her.
She looked again at the copy of Christian’s first novel which had been the letter’s hiding place. She withdrew it again slowly from the bookcase, flipped the pages. There were no other errant pieces of paper, no other letters.
She put the book back where she’d found it.
Perhaps the "Anne" that the letter referred to wasn’t Anne Case at all. Perhaps the letter was simply a piece of fiction, part of a new manuscript. Perhaps the Anne referred to was another Anne. There had been no date on the letter, so it was impossible to tell how old it was. And it was unsigned, too, so it was impossible to say definitely that Christian had even written it.
She shook her head miserably. Of course he’d written it. The handwriting had been his, the style of writing had been his—intense and circuitous; of course he’d written it.
There was another copy of Greed standing next to the one she had looked through. She pulled it from the bookcase, hesitated, flipped through it.
The pages opened at once to several folded pieces of paper stuck between pages 102 and 103. She lifted the sheets out. She unfolded them. They were written in a small, meticulous hand—not Christian’s bold strokes.
She read:
He’s a chameleon. Many people are. But he’s especially good at it. His whole countenance changes, not just his skin. And, unlike a chameleon, he changes it at will, at the necessity of the moment, and of the conquest to b
e made.
He professed to know me and understand me. Perhaps he did. I believed that he did, and it made me feel . . . hopeful. But even if he did, or didn’t, there is the fact of himself, the fact that he is a monster, the fact that I have slept with a monster. Thank God I cannot bear children.
"No more," I told him. He professed to understand. He said that I had misinterpreted him and though that was an injustice, he would overlook it, that he understood me, and understood why I had misinterpreted him. He would forgive me immediately, he said.
"For all the tomorrows we will have," he said, "I will forgive you now for this injustice you have committed against me." He said this smilingly, and his eyes were a little moist as if he were overcome by the emotion of the moment. It was an act, of course. One of his chameleon changes.
"No, I don’t believe you," I told him. "I believed you before. Too many times. I don’t believe you now. This is over." And I wanted to add, "I’m sorry." But I didn’t, because I was glad it was over. Our two weeks together were history and I was ecstatic. And troubled, too. Because I could see that he would not let go. Perhaps he could not let go. I had disarmed him, seen him for himself, exposed him. I was his enemy. I had to be bested, and he was going to do it.
"You think you know me," he said. "Perhaps you do. Perhaps you know as much as anyone . . . more than anyone. But you don’t know enough, my love." I cringed when he called me that. It wasn’t always so, but it was then. The phrase "my love" was, from his lips, something malodorous. I wondered, suddenly, how much anyone knew him, how significantly he had fooled everyone else in his life. Or was I somehow more vulnerable, and naïve?
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