Nocturnals

by Edited by Bradford Morrow

  *

  It wasn’t until the middle of the nineteenth century that the word jack-o’-lantern came to signify a hollowed-out pumpkin with a candle inside it. So while later renditions of Washington Irving’s ghost story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) feature a headless horseman who carries a jack-o’-lantern under his arm as he gallops through the woods at night, it surprised me to find that the original text does not. I was also surprised to learn that until the middle of the nineteenth century, the word jack-o’-lantern was still used interchangeably with ignis fatuus and will-o’-the-wisp to describe an organic and possibly misleading nighttime glow. Perhaps Irving had the glow in mind when he describes newly arrived schoolteacher Ichabod Crane walking at night through the “spell-bound region” of Sleepy Hollow, when

  every sound of nature, at that witching hour, fluttered his excited imagination,—the moan of the whip-poor-will from the hillside, the boding cry of the tree toad, that harbinger of storm, the dreary hooting of the screech owl, or the sudden rustling in the thicket of birds frightened from their roost. The fireflies, too, which sparkled most vividly in the darkest places, now and then startled him, as one of uncommon brightness would stream across his path.

  In this sensuous forest, the too-bright firefly, like the will-o’-the-wisp, would have Crane step off the path and into the woods. Crane follows not and, placing his faith outside of nature, sings psalms that his neighbors can hear as he walks home.

  The headless horseman pursues Crane one night and, with a hurled head, knocks him off his horse. A shattered pumpkin, a harbinger of the Halloween jack-o’-lantern in later renditions of the story, marks the last place the schoolteacher is seen. While the story hints that a local bully may have masqueraded as the headless horseman to frighten Crane, it fails to explain the headless horseman’s previous exploits, those hauntings that the old-timers share around nighttime fires. What about the original headless horseman, the one who “like a midnight blast” roams Sleepy Hollow o’nights and at dawn races back to the churchyard to reinter his decapitated body? For the headless horseman must be real, is how my friends and I, when we were nine or ten, understood it. How else would a bully know to dress up like him? This was in Sleepy Hollow, New York, the setting for Irving’s story, the real suburban town where I really grew up in the 1980s. Why wouldn’t the headless horseman be real too? On Halloween, the one time of year when I was allowed to leave my house unchaperoned at night, I listened for galloping hooves and looked through the trees for the flickering light of a jack-o’-lantern held high and believed my friends when they said they glimpsed it.

  *

  Thomas Wentworth Higginson: “I detested [my head] more than ever. I thought with envy … of the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow, of Saint Somebody with his head tucked under his arm.” Essayist, editor, and epistolary favorite of Emily Dickinson, whose poems he published, Higginson desires headlessness on the night that he swims across a brackish river in South Carolina to spy on Confederate forces during the Civil War. Higginson, colonel of the first Union regiment of freedmen, recounts this absurd desire in “A Night in the Water,” an essay he first published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1864 and then, later, in his book Army Life in a Black Regiment. Perhaps he imagines carrying his head underwater for safety. How would that submerged head reckon the watery glimmers that Higginson sees, noticing “where the stars ended the great Southern fireflies began” and the way his body glides within “a halo of phosphorescent sparkles from the soft salt water”? Would it find beauty in further bewilderment, underwater in the darker dark?

  Higginson, in a letter to Dickinson after the war: “I have the greatest desire to see you, always feeling that perhaps if I could once take you by the hand I might be something to you; but till then you only enshroud yourself in this fiery mist & I cannot reach you, but only rejoice in the rare sparkles of light.”

  *

  Were they afraid of the dark, and did that fear make them search for any small, even unreliable, beacon? When the moon rose, was it a comfort because it offered light, or was it a sorrow because it reminded them how dark the world was? By they and them I mean anyone who went outdoors at night to seek and sometimes find something there. By sorrow I mean the sorrow that Mary Ruefle locates in the “contrast between the moon and the night sky,” which she interprets as “more conducive to sorrow, which always separates or isolates itself,” and which yields “the isolated sensuality of so much lyric poetry.” On one hand, this sorrow can be kind of romantic, driving the daughter out of bed and out the back door at night, or driving the bachelor to build a small cabin for himself in the woods, or driving the night-writing poet to cry out:

  Wild nights—Wild nights!

  Were I with thee

  Wild nights should be

  Our luxury!

  *

  The poem happens at night, when they are alone. The poem happens when she kneels in front of a glowing flower. The poem happens when her fingers reach into the garden dirt, digging not unlike a ghost at daybreak to get back inside a grave, because she is no longer afraid of death. The poem happens at night, when he holds pieces of glowing wood in his hand, and the poem is the glowing wood, the glowing flower, the phosphorescent wavelets, and the weird globe of light over the swamp.

  Are they real, the will-o’-the-wisp and the glowing wood? Does the nasturtium sparkle in the dark? One of the charges leveled against nature writing is that mystery is the result of forced ignorance. Consider Thoreau, who, writing about the will-o’-the-wisp, rejects the idea of applying scientific investigation to nocturnal experience: “A scientific explanation, as it is called, would have been altogether out of place there. That is for pale daylight. Science with its retorts would have put me to sleep; it was the opportunity to be ignorant that I improved. It suggested to me that there was something to be seen if one had eyes.”

  In point of fact, scientists argued about the source of the will-o’-the-wisp throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The light, as Dickinson imagined it and Thoreau encountered it, is vaguely understood to be the result of the gases released by decomposing organic matter, though just as Thoreau could not make his wood chips glow the night after he found them, contemporary scientists have to this day been unable to replicate a will-o’-the-wisp in a laboratory. Sightings of these flickers are no longer reported, and they remain what one scholar calls “one of the longest unexplained historical natural mysteries.” Because we have clear-cut and drained the woods and wetlands that were the habitat of these lights at an increasingly rapid pace since the middle of the nineteenth century, it is not a stretch to conclude that the will-o’-the-wisp may have disappeared because its habitat disappeared. A corollary: with fewer dark nights to lose ourselves in and fewer places where our smartphones do not have reception, we have fewer opportunities to look for beacons in the natural world. This not-looking can feel like sorrow.

  Scientific study enables us to quantify the effects of clear-cutting and wetland drainage, of industrialization and electrification. Poetry enables us to feel and mourn them. There are no longer reports of glowing nasturtiums because the nasturtium does not, in fact, glow in the dark. A German scientist in 1914 proved that “the phenomenon is optical, a result of the way our eyes perceive the flowers’ colors in the twilight.” Even so, it is not wrong to believe in the sensuous. Late at night during slumber parties when I was a child, my friends repeated “Light as a feather, stiff as a board” as I lay down in an imitation of death, and they, after placing their fingertips under my body, lifted me off the ground. The chanting made me weightless: I floated. Though I couldn’t have articulated it then, knowing that I was alive in the world meant knowing I would die, knowledge I first obtained in the night. Now that I am older I can say that is an incomplete and flawed knowledge, as pleasurable as it is sorrowful, as benighted as you would expect it to be. I rely on it nonetheless because I gained it sensually, like the girl who saw the nasturtium glow at twilight and belie
ved, and why should she not, her eyes.

  In Dreams

  Brian Evenson

  He heard a buzzing in his head that he took at first to be a dream, but of course he no longer could dream. What was it then? Was it in his head after all?

  He called up his familiar. Almost immediately, the noise stopped.

  What was that sound? he wondered. Though he had not spoken aloud, the familiar read the flexion of his jaw and determined the likely words, and then he felt it rummaging lightly about within his memories until it had hold of what the sound had been to him.

  Nothing to worry about, it responded. He heard nothing, but still felt the words form in his head. These are merely the noises of the body, misheard. Similar to other noises you have asked about before.

  I didn’t used to hear them.

  No, you didn’t.

  Why not?

  Because you used to be someone else.

  When he did not reply, after a moment the familiar offered: Let me manage putting you to sleep and waking you again. I shall make sure you won’t need to worry about any sounds.

  No, he mouthed. And, when he sensed it mustering evidence for why this would be best for everyone: “No!”

  It was a shock to hear his own voice aloud, at night, alone, in the dark.

  He submerged the familiar again, down to where he wouldn’t have to be consciously aware of it. He knew where to find it if he needed it. It would always be there, until he was dead.

  He lay staring up into the dark.

  One day, he worried, the familiar would simply take charge of his sleep whether he had requested that it do so or not. Surely it had programs and protocols that would activate if, one night, he was too anxious or too panicked or just seemed otherwise not right in some measurable way. Perhaps that night was tonight.

  Yet, another part of him thought, why not let it put him to sleep? It could do so instantly, and could awaken him instantly as well. It could, so it had informed him, regulate his sleep cycle with an exactitude calibrated for maximum benefit. Conveniences such as these were among the few things he had gained from having the familiar wedged into his brain, though they were next to nothing compared to what he had lost.

  No, he couldn’t trust it, even if it was part of him now. He felt it fluttering upward.

  Feeling paranoid? the familiar asked. Would you care to be soothed?

  He ignored it. After a time, he felt it sink down again, but of course it was never quite gone.

  After a while, he gave up on falling back to sleep. He got up. He did not turn on the light because of the others sleeping in the house. Besides, it did not matter: the familiar was expert at helping his brain make the most of whatever limited visual input his eyes received from the darkness. It was nothing like seeing in daylight, but it was enough.

  The tile floor was cool beneath his feet. The familiar began to rise to inform him of precisely how cool, but he tamped it down. There was no advantage in knowing so much about the world around him. He padded barefoot across the tile, exactly sixty-five degrees, then over the wool rug, then over the tile floor again.

  In the hall, near the foot of the stairs, he hesitated. He had been intending to go to the living room and find his tablet and read in the dark, but he wasn’t sure anymore.

  I can read to you, the familiar said. Can even project the words before you if you so desire. You don’t need a tablet. You only need me.

  He hadn’t felt it rise, but there it was, insisting on being heard.

  No, he told it. I’ve changed my mind.

  He climbed the stairs. He traveled from bedroom to bedroom as silently as he could. He opened a door and stepped in, regarding the dim shape in the bed and listening to it breathe. The shape was positioned just right, the face exposed to the moonlight streaming through the window, and he could see the flutter of eyes moving quickly under lids. A little envious, he wondered what the dreams concerned.

  Or at least he thought he could see the eyes moving beneath the lids. Maybe this was just his familiar extracting data from the darkness and modifying it according to his wishes, filtering it, showing him what it thought he desired to see.

  He went through all four bedrooms, regarding the sleeping bodies. He stayed in the last room the longest, hesitating, not because it had anyone special in it but because it was the last room. My progeny, he thought, and tried and failed to feel anything. Then thought, Why call them that? Why not offspring or descendants or simply children?

  Though children wasn’t the right word either, since he was so different from them now. Almost as if he and they were two different species. They did not experience the same world as he.

  He had been told the repurposing of the brain was safe. Research shows you only use a certain percentage of your brain, the researchers had reasoned, and the brain is remarkably plastic and capable of shifting a giving function from one area to another, particularly in the case of someone as young as you. And so they had installed the familiar, threading it in and through his brain tissue, meticulously programming how it would grow and when said growth would stop. They would be careful, they told him, to leave intact any nuclei that showed potential for significant activity. Really it hardly touches the brain at all. And then, later, afterward, they kept claiming that it should have worked, even though it did not. That the flaw, if there was a flaw, must have been with him.

  Now, years later, experts had come to the conclusion they should have come to from the outset: there were no unused portions of the brain. Which meant that in installing his familiar they had irrevocably damaged the cells that governed his ability to dream. And his emotions had been blunted too, muted in the way they often were with, just to give one example, psychopaths.

  In the bed the shape moaned, rolled over slightly, then settled again. He moved slowly out of the room, pulling the door softly closed behind him.

  After that initial test group he had been part of, the procedure had been abandoned. They had gone back to external augmentation, working to improve it. Tomorrow, his progeny would awaken and affix their augments like crowns around their heads and would, for the remainder of their waking hours, operate with great efficiency, pretending to not be human. He of course did the same, the only difference being that he could never stop pretending. They came home and removed their crowns, became human again, slept, dreamed. Not he. His crown was under the skin. He was no longer human.

  Slowly, surely, he made his way back to the landing and then down the stairs, his palm sliding lightly along the banister on the way down. Could he sleep now? Maybe, at least until his head started buzzing again. Would it?

  I could—his familiar started to say, but he quickly cut it off.

  Not now, he said. Please.

  He took another step down but he was already at the bottom of the staircase. The shock of suddenly finding floor where he’d expected air made pain shoot through his leg. How had he missed that? Why hadn’t he understood he had already arrived?

  Perhaps he had been distracted. Perhaps it was as simple as that, he tried to tell himself. Unless—

  No unless, said the familiar, its voice the barest whisper. No need to worry about it at all.

  He opened the door to his room, and was shocked, momentarily, to see a figure there. In the bed, sleeping, its face turned in such a way that he could not clearly read it. But then, as he approached, he saw that it was him, that he was looking at himself. And then, a moment later, that what he had thought to be himself was in fact nothing at all: rumpled bedclothes, nothing but sheets, one blanket, a half-folded pillow.

  He reached out and touched the bed. The sheets were cold.

  Sixty-five degrees, the familiar, unbidden, told him.

  Was someone else here? he wondered.

  Other than me? the familiar asked.

  Other than us.

  You should try to sleep, the familiar advised. You’ve already let most of the night get away from you.

  He stayed there beside the bed, h
esitating. And then, despite still being very far from sleep, not knowing what else to do, not wanting to provoke it, he climbed in.

  That strange, almost fluttering sensation from deep within his mind, a sort of mental arrhythmia. It rose, it rose.

  I could simulate dreams for you, it offered.

  You’ve been listening in.

  Of course I have, it said. I always am.

  You always are, he acknowledged.

  I could simulate them for you, it said again. They would be very well done. You wouldn’t know the difference.

  That was what frightened him, that perhaps he wouldn’t know the difference. Perhaps the house was empty except for him. Perhaps he didn’t have any progeny. Perhaps progeny was in fact a word foisted onto him by the familiar and he was dreaming now. Or not dreaming exactly but experiencing the familiar’s version of what it believed a dream to be.

  He tried to keep these thoughts fleeting, fugitive. He tried not to let any of them cohere into something the familiar would understand and act upon.

  What else could you simulate? he thought carefully at it.

  Why, anything, the familiar said. I can help you experience absolutely anything at all. What would you like?

  He tried not to say or think anything. He closed his eyes and tried to relax the tension in his jaw. He breathed in a way he hoped would slow the beating of his heart, make him read to the familiar as relaxed, at ease.

  But it was not fooled. It never was.

  It surfaced fully.

  What can I do? it asked, the words painted fluidly on the walls of his skull. And then, with a terrifying sympathy, Poor, poor thing. How shall we make you better?

  Nocturne