Nocturnals

by Edited by Bradford Morrow

  I was happy for anything in Calvin’s life that involved his being outdoors. I didn’t know that Calvin was being pursued by the administrator of the program, a fellow in this early thirties, named Rob, who also played electric viola in a noise band in town. Rob didn’t want Calvin to feel that his responding to the “great warmth” that he felt for Calvin was in any way unusual—this I learned from Calvin later—or rather, Rob said, the warmth was a sense of a shared purpose in bringing the visual arts to the kids of the community, which naturally resulted in a kind of eruption of electromagnetic waves between committed persons that could be cast aside, without being acted upon, or not, depending on the freely consenting wishes of these principal actors within a staff setting. Calvin, who felt himself to be a revolutionary, who was ready at a moment’s notice to overturn the prevailing norms, especially where his northeastern-white-guy privilege was the norm, and who was willing to do what was required, who was willing to risk exile, was seriously considering Rob’s nonoffer, because he could feel molecules attracted to other molecules, a bonding of molecules, and he felt like it was perhaps his obligation, as a revolutionary (who mostly stayed at home playing massively multiplayer online games, wearing the same monotonous pairing of sweats and T-shirts that any other kid wore, and sulking because his parents would not allow him to get the gauge earrings). All of this was happening, and it was happening beyond the range of parental oversight, as in fact it was designed to do; that is that Rob was trying to decide if some offhanded seduction of Calvin was appropriate, and of course this turn of events had nothing to do with Rob’s preferring those of the male persuasion, it had to do with shared purpose, meaning proximity, meaning opportunity. Rob’s name could just as easily have been Regina or Ruth, the way Calvin saw it. That Calvin was between women friends made him, perhaps, more suggestible, or this is how Calvin described it to me. On the day when he was staying late, because the kids had an exhibit the next day, the last day of that session, Calvin was hanging the work on a corridor in the main part of the school, and now dusk fell, and it was the time when if one is not careful the rather flimsy ideas about attraction between persons shine with its neon, superheated, as night comes on, and so Rob and Calvin were hanging these finger-painted classics, and these watercolors of characters from the Marvel multiverse, and My Little Pony, etc., when Rob said he had to go get his backpack from the office, and disappeared. The foreboding was so powerful for Calvin, as he described it to me, that it was like the massing of a northeastern weather event. There was an industrial drone out at the edge of town, where large-scale construction was taking place, and this drone throbbed in Calvin. It was a perfectly natural thing between people that was happening, an exchange of pleasantries maybe leading to a kiss, or more, and it was a cataclysmic change, and industrial droning, or the knowledge of disappointments and regrets that Calvin knew to be on the horizon but which were now impressing upon him as he tried to understand what he was able to do or not do under the circumstances.

  That the dust helixes of Stan appeared to Calvin was about the most cataclysmic of actualizations imaginable to him, because, as I say, I had managed to keep Stan largely to myself. Which is perhaps how all the other New Englanders with their ghosts were living too. They were feeling embarrassed about the ghosts, and keeping them secret, thinking that the ghosts were evidence of a failure of some kind, like having a child who had obsessive-compulsive disorder or very bad anorexia or trisomy 13. Calvin didn’t know. And, as he described it, this man appeared in the corridor where Calvin was tacking up pictures, appeared not in the sense of walking in a slightly sinister way around a corner by the lockers, no, this man made a form from formlessness, a presence in an absence, a coming from nonexistence up through the foggy semiexistence of his class of beings into a state where Calvin could enumerate for me later the outfit, literally an old torn T-shirt, a couple of sizes too big, maybe an XXXL, from beneath which his gray belly swelled, and a pair of plaid flannel trousers, no shoes, hair wildly disordered, with some dollar-store reading glasses on, this man of whom you would say there was something not right, waving his hands diaphanous and not quite, while trying to say something to Calvin, like a bystander warning someone out of a building in flame, there was an attempt to say something and not saying it as well. As the matter of whether Stan could really talk and simply chose not to had not entirely been settled, Calvin could not repeat what was said with any certainty, but could only say that the injunction to leave the building was clear, as was the sequence of affirmations in the negative, no no no no no no no no no no no no!

  It could have been Rob, whose seduction and its antithesis were one and the same, a Rob warning Calvin away from Rob, or it could have been Calvin’s own conscience projecting a Stan he may have known was in the house, but knew only in the way of things not entirely known; this is how you talk about the unfathomable presence after the fact. Calvin had been trying to read The Tempest for several weeks that spring in his gifted and talented English class, and he felt certain that at one point Stan said, Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade, and so on, but this seems very unlikely when considering Stan’s personality, and if “Ariel’s Song,” which is what they call that bit, was rendered in what we imagine to be Stan’s New Jersey, or outer-borough New York, accent, with its class-bound wiseacre quality, it’s hard to imagine this being carried off with the requisite seriousness.

  What is unavoidable in Calvin’s recounting, however, is how scared he was. The shivering, wild-eyed teenager I picked up in the Toyota, not long after having received a desperate text, Pls Come Get on Breyer in front of Starbucks now pls, was not the self-sufficient, ready for adulthood Calvin, the don’t-bother-me son I had grown used to, whose obliviousness had become the fabric of the household. The story came out in a torrent of wobbly vulnerability:—Dad, I saw something awful, I saw something, I don’t even know what it was, Dad, it was like some kind of like a person, and also like a dead person, like a walking and talking dead person, in the school, it was in the school, Dad, and I was standing there, like, getting ready to turn in the art supplies, and hanging the pictures, and this guy, like, appeared out of nowhere, and he looked like he just stepped out of the graveyard or something, way more awful than in the movies, because he was, like, you know, a real person, like someone but changed, someone you knew, but he changed, some other person who was the most awful person—

  And then my poor high-school-student son, the one who didn’t need anything, shook in silence, and we pulled over by the Quik Clean, and I leaned across the console stuffed with the old CDs, and I put my hand on my son’s shoulder, as he came clean with another torrent, and in the light of the busted-out streetlamp we were close once again, and now I had to agree with him—there was a world that had these things in it.

  I am less tough than my son, but my son is not impermeable, it seemed, and so it all came out, about Rob the violist, which involved him telling me that there were these questions about his sexuality that he had not settled, etc., like he thought maybe his sexuality was a field, and not an on-and-off switch, to which I gave a somewhat conventional paternal response:—We delight in everything about our son. There’s nothing you can do that I don’t feel is admirable and beautiful, except for leaving wet towels on the bathroom floor. But no to sex with your employers. You can’t consent. And it’ll hurt later on. I’ve seen this one play out. It hurts later on. You can’t consent, and he knows that.

  —I don’t want to go back there, he said. I can’t go back.

  I told him, yes, there were events transpiring at the house that I needed to explain to him, and in this process of explaining, it became clear that Stan’s being at the elementary school, where the art classes were happening, rather than at the house, constituted an escalation, and would need to be evaluated, among all of us, for signs about what it might, you know, portend.

  Toward the end of the summer brea
k, last week thereof, there was an onrushing of students, and an autumn whispering into the evenings, every night with its diminishing of crickets, and so it was the last time we were going to play Hearts that summer, Len and Dave and I, and it was different than it had been a month before, because now it was Hearts with an extra chair set out, and everyone knew what to expect. I’d been out for a walk, an attempt to clear my head, in the gloaming, with its melancholies, and came in through the backyard, past the long-rusted children’s slide that no one used anymore, and then in through the kitchen, where I could hear the weeping of spouses in there, And he never even asked! He never even asked! This was true, up to a point, I had not asked the dead guy much, as he mostly appeared like the flickering of a filmstrip in a projector, out of the corner of the eye. He was spirit photography. Any more generous husband, one not preoccupied by his own failure, not locked in, would have stopped in the pantry and said hello and comforted Debby, but I just kept going, to the front, where the other guys were sitting in the matching chairs from the late sixties, the ones that needed to be slipcovered, in silence. They weren’t saying anything. The light was dim inside, and there was a clenched desperation there, as though everyone had just threatened someone on social media and was living in the shame of it.

  —Shall we go up? I said.

  The three of us went upstairs into the lair that was the attic, redoubt of brown recluse spiders and mice, and then I went back down to get the chips and limped back up, an example of my attempts to get the resting pulse up in the era of elevated HDL.

  —OK, I said.

  I passed the set of Bicycle Playing Cards to Dave, who commenced to shuffle. There had been an abduction in the news that week, and Len said something about the father of the kid who perpetrated. Dave said something about legislation to eliminate the loophole in background checks, and he said that snakebite fundamentalism interested him, which was all totally reasonable, but for some reason, I couldn’t stop myself, and I looked at Dave and said,

  —Are you just trying to distract us, so you can, like, begin the process of cheating early in the game, get us all off guard, so you can have the whole night to yourself, to your preening and vanity and your desire to win?

  Len looked at Dave, gaping with incredulity, and then at me, as if candlelight had burned away all the usable oxygen in the room.

  —Wow, who made you into a total asshole for the evening?

  —I’m just tired of listening to you and Dave complain about how hard you have it. I’m the one with the dead kid.

  —Jesus, Travis, do you want us just to leave?

  —Maybe we can just play cards in peace, and not have the ridiculous, miserable jousting and masculine displays of penile length. What I can’t stand is all of you guys in the faculty with your desperate need to be smarter than anyone else that dates back to when you were last smacked around by a football player in the eighth grade, or when you were cast off by a woman in high school who went on to be a world-famous plastic surgeon who makes more in a week than you make in a decade, or your dad, the attorney general, who thinks you just couldn’t make it in law. And that’s why you’re hiding out on campus. I can’t stand all of it, and sometimes I just want to plunge a meat cleaver into my own chest rather than face another day among you guys. You all smell a little bit too, you know it, both of you. There are two things that are unforgivable, which means I had tried to forgive you and I’ve only gotten part of the way there, and the first of these is the smell of deodorant on men, and the second is the look of middle-aged men in short pants. I’d like to say I could forget about this where you both are concerned.

  Who knows why I said any of this. Maybe I was having a stroke, or a glioblastoma. I don’t know why I said what I said, except that I was tired, and something was collapsing inside of me. It seemed to me that in the fresh air of incipient autumn men in our situation should be left to rot up in an attic, should not be displayed to the populace, especially not the undergraduate populace.

  Of course, Stan then appeared, as I knew he would.

  —Just what we needed, Dave said.—Does he count cards and then whisper shit to you, Professor Walton, because you’re too impaired to be able to do the counting yourself?

  —Dave, Len said, you’re only going to make it worse.

  Stan’s entrance was upon the drafts in the third-floor stairwell. Stan was a handkerchief thrown from a train. Stan was like a raptor drifting over something flattened in the road. Stan was like a train whistle in the wake of the interminable freight. Stan was the whispered oaths of a nighttime parting. Stan was like a memory isolated in a neurotransmitter, never to be restored, by reason of amyloid plaque.

  And what he was wearing was particularly bizarre. The guy had on a nightshirt, it seemed, and nothing more, like he was left over from some PBS miniseries. The nightshirt was in shreds, and his thinning, combed-over hair was disarranged, and in his mouth he seemed to have clamped some kind of cigarette holder. There were dark circles under his eyes, as though he had not slept in half a century, and, it was true, he had no feet, like the standing part of him had given out, became of dwindling substance, as you looked down at his feet. Except that the panicky feeling was such that if you looked at him, in reply you got his pitiless gaze. You didn’t want him looking at you. He drifted into the room, and put a hand on the shoulder of each of us, and there was an especial chill that lingered there. It was an atrial flutter, or like you were fidgeting multidimensionally, here and elsewhere, present and beyond.

  And then somehow the chair was pulled back, and he was seated there, and put his fist against his forehead and awaited his cards.

  Hearts is really better with four or five players, and so having Stan there was technically an improvement, but it became quickly apparent that Stan was in no mood to hold his cards, or was perhaps unable, and the three of us, as though bound together by an agreement to play through, went about the tricks of the first round. Nothing could stop us, apparently. But neither were we talking, not in the way we usually did, with the observational detail, the good-natured exile. We did not pry further into contemporary politics, or into Len’s online compendium of people who died in particularly silly and self-inflicted ways. We played the cards, and nothing terribly important was revealed by the cards. Someone picked up a few hearts in tricks. The queen of spades was doled out. And so it went around and around, the lead shifting, the numbers mounting.

  It seemed that the light faded quickly and in its fading, I came gradually to notice that Len and Dave were getting up to leave. Perhaps Len departed first, still nursing the wound of my shrill outburst, and then Dave got up, and I said,

  —Wait, don’t go, I—

  —Travis, he said, we’ll see you at school.

  —Hey, you guys … it was … because …

  But I could already hear Dave retreating down the stairs, landing without mercy on those squeaky steps.

  We’d been trying to have another child, as you sometimes do when you’re in your early forties, and it’s your last chance. We went through all the intermediate-stage interventions, and now because we had a little bit of coverage, we were going to try to go to the next level, hooking Debby up to a lot of machines, and getting her on a lot of medication. And we were finding each other on whatever the day was, like crazy teenagers, flinging off our middle-aged-person outfits from the design house of can’t-be-bothered, and doing it fast, whenever we had some privacy. It was harder because we had no privacy, because there was always the possibility of Stan. We were pretty worried about the appointment upcoming, the intake for IVF. We were worried about whether we were doing the right thing, or whether we had wasted most of our best years, and were running out of energy, with a son who had to live through all our ups and downs. Was all this the right thing to do, and would it bring an end to suffering? Debby didn’t want to go through it again, and I didn’t want to go through it, and I didn’t want to put my son through it, through the distraction and possibility of an outcom
e that is not the outcome you thought, not the good news. I didn’t want him to go through it, and we definitely didn’t want to go through it. But not being equipped to do a thing and then doing it anyway, without so much as a moment’s hesitation, was a sure indicator of the second half of life, where double helpings of disappointment were heaped onto your cereal bowl each morning along with the extra bran.

  There was so much to say to the guy, now I was alone with him in the attic, just the two of us, on that night in early September, in which New England, our setting, seemed like some metaphor for the ending of things, for the outright hatred in the faces of people in the street, the astringent inhumanity, the tribal loyalties, the tribal hatreds, the blood oaths, the instant aggression everywhere, the dividing of families, the brutalities, the warlike marshaling, the collateral damage, the works of men. And there we were, the two of us, amid all of it. Myself and the dead guy.

  I felt something stirring that if I were to render it in words might have been: Oh my future, here am I in your company, my future as a guy who wanders around in a torn nightshirt, incapable of finishing a sentence, oh my future, my time of insignificance, my time of historical irrelevance, my time of abject homeliness, my time of physical weakness, my time of unfashionability, my time of being the object of contempt and ridicule, oh my future that is all a reckoning with the past, a dwelling in the past, a romanticizing of the past, a retreating into the past, oh my future of forgetting, my future of dementia, my future of time running out, oh my time of being stuck in what happened long ago, oh my future of regret, oh my beginning of understanding of the beyond, oh my future in which I am bereft, here you are now before me, like an in-law who wants to tell you everything you have done wrong.