Nocturnals

by Edited by Bradford Morrow

  Is it any wonder that we fought when she got home? She was late. It was almost dark. But I went back to where we’d been that morning. “You must not have understood what I was saying. I don’t care about the experience. I’m not looking for some kind of phenomenological approach,” I said, using words I knew would infuriate her because of her background in art history. I barely knew what I was saying. Besides, I was telling her the opposite of what was true. That was another factor in our argument.

  Things went downhill. She was tired after a long day. I put on my raincoat (it was raining) and left the house past eight o’clock. This is my favorite time even in bad circumstances, and there is nothing like the city on a November night. In the rain I imagined other softer, later, drier evenings, the leaves underfoot, the wind in the bare branches. The streets are crowded in my neighborhood until about 10:45, when they empty out, the people scurrying as if to find their seats in a darkened hall. At such moments, one is aware of the sounds obscured during the day—the tuning of the orchestra, a dog’s high bark, the hiss of the pneumatic brakes on a sagging bus, a distant bell, a cop car, an alarm.

  I walked down the sidewalk and across the street. But after a few blocks I got it into my mind to apologize or else demand an apology, which amounts to the same thing. In either case I would be out of the wet. I turned to go back, and as I did so I saw Maggie on the other side of the street, turning into a side alley. I thought she must have followed me. But then immediately I changed my mind because of the self-assured and decisive movements of her body. It was more likely she had not seen me at all. I crossed the street and stood under an awning in the dark. The consistency of the rain was changing now, the drops smaller and less distinct, tending toward mist.

  “Could it be something like not being able to feel certain emotions?” she had said. “Or not understand the needs and desires of other people?”

  No! It wasn’t like that. What I found frustrating was that she might as well have been talking about herself. In fact she hadn’t understood the first thing about what I was trying to say, or about my discomfort. Now, later, I watched her stride down the alley away from me. She passed under a yellow light: Straw-colored hair. Long legs. Holding an umbrella from our local PBS station. Wearing a coat I thought I recognized. In a normal marriage (I have found), after one has (for example) shouted at someone for no reason, one begins to fantasize about mortality. Not all at once. I thought as she reached the corner of the road that she might stumble over the curb, fall, and slam her knee, and I’d be there to lift her up. A little farther on, she might suffer an unlikely accident, like the one that had befallen me. A delivery cyclist, for example, might lose control of his machine on the wet cobblestones. She might break her head, a neat fracture along the occipitomastoid suture, as I had on a night like this. Or else something unique to her, something shocking: a bicycle spoke, for example, detached from the rim, could easily pierce her through the eye. “How many times do I have to tell you?” I might say as I direct traffic around her or else disperse the curious onlookers.

  The spike of her own umbrella might stab her in an unguarded place. Certain Chinese assassins, I learned from a late-night movie, are able to touch their victims with their extended forefingers in just such secret places, to ruinous effect. Perhaps a light jab on her skinny breastbone might stop her heart, not all at once. Perhaps a thumb on the back of her head above her visual cortex. But she would stagger on to the other side of the road and then collapse. I would see her fall. A choked apology on my lips, I would start toward her, hold her in my arms as she gasped, bewildered, unsure even at the moment of death of what was happening to her. Her eyes would blink as she indicated her last wishes in a type of code. I imagined her funeral, her college friends who hated me and hate me still. Her parents, who despised me. Yet even they, grudgingly, could recognize the intensity of my anguish. Dressed in a crisp black suit, I would stammer heartfelt words from the lectern at St. James’s.

  I felt safe picturing these things because she was so deft and competent in all her movements. She could do anything, and nothing was her fault. Unaware of the danger she was in, she sidestepped opportunity after opportunity. No flowerpot fell from a balcony above her as she turned west. No careening bus met her at the avenue under the streetlight. She stalked away from me through the wet dark and I followed after her, drenched now. My mood had changed. This was no aimless saunter. She was going someplace. I myself as I left the house had texted the senior editor (an overdue response to a worried question), and now I found it easy to convince myself that Maggie was on a similar errand. Who could blame her, after all? Who or what could stop her, short of a falling safe or anvil or, farther on, a lightning bolt?

  A cold drizzle in the comfortable night. A plane tree in its circular grating. A streetlamp surrounded by a nimbus of mist. Now I hung back, and in the larger streets I allowed other pedestrians to come between us. Now I no longer felt any desire to apologize or to console, admonish, berate, or praise. For twenty blocks I tailed her through the dark, wet streets, curious to see where she was going, the address and identity of her secret husband. (When Maggie and I first started sleeping together, during my previous marriage, I had called her my “secret wife.”) I followed her now along the edge of a small park under the bronze nose of a forgotten Central American dignitary, high on his plinth. Past him we were in another, poorer, part of town.

  In a single village in northern Sweden, forty or so people suffer from a disability called congenital analgesia, which means they can’t feel physical pain. This is not comparable to the problems of someone who is immune to other kinds of suffering—humiliation, say, or jealousy, or resentment. In no way is it comparable. Maggie paused, finally, at a clapboard house set back from the road, which was now made of cinder rather than pavement. A cast-iron fence blocked access to a leaf-strewn yard. From the corner I watched her pause at the gate.

  When I say “blocked,” I mean symbolically—the fence wasn’t more than three feet high, and rusted through in places. I’m not sure it will surprise you to learn, as I watched Maggie unlatch the gate and then proceed up the flagstone walk, furling her umbrella as she did so, that it occurred to me to wonder if she was my wife at all, or whether I had followed an unknown woman across town, confused by chance similarities in her walk and dress. Now it was too dark to accurately assess her face, even as she turned under the locust tree. But there was something in the way she moved that suggested a much older woman. She paused again on the front porch, then slipped inside, and I saw a light turn on in what must have been the hallway.

  This wasn’t the first time. A few weeks before I had seen her at a museum opening, walking down the main stairway perhaps twenty feet away. Opening my mouth to speak above the crowd, I realized she was still at my elbow, talking to some friends. Her voice was already in my ear. I thought she looked quite fetching in a gray-rose dress I must have given her, but then it turned out she hadn’t worn it at all.

  There is a hole in the fence at the edge of the property and I passed through it to the back, along a brick wall that divided the lot from the neighbor’s. I had no plan except to spy in the back windows from the brick patio. Just in general, the tone here was different from the front of the house. A birdbath. A stretch of garden. Oh, the night was thick until the security light came on, a bright circle. I could see Maggie inside—I’ll still call her that. She opened the French windows. “George,” she said, “come in. Are you just going to stand out there? You’ll catch your death.” So I went up and went in.

  Nightgrief

  Joyce Carol Oates

  No need to speak of it. By mutual consent, no words, no speech, no language and scarcely the complicity of touch, instinctively they began to shun the day, which is to say light—daylight. For there was, for them, the solace, balm, oblivion of night that coursed through their parched arteries and quickened their hearts grown wizened as prunes.

  As in a reverse tropism each began to shrink from the gl
are of daylight. Independent of the other, each began to crave, with an almost sensual appetite, night.

  During the day, too much noise, commotion. You could see much too clearly, and too far in any direction. Daylight was blunt, raw, vulgar. Daylight was exhausting.

  Too many children in daylight. Kids on bicycles. Shouts, laughter. At the 7-Eleven, in the drugstore parking lot, on the steps of the branch library—loitering teenagers. The wife hurried past them, eyes averted like a tightrope walker on a high wire, no net below.

  And afterward, collapsed in her car, sobbing, choking in a rage at herself—No. Stop. You will be seen, pitied. Just—stop.

  Anywhere in the vicinity of sprawling Englewood Park and particularly the southeastern corner, which was the softball field—sinkholes to be avoided. In daylight it had become treacherous to drive on certain streets, roadways. Past the beige-brick Florence Howe Middle School on Riverdale and past the red-brick Mt. Olive High School on North Main. In daylight these (ordinary, terrible) buildings loomed freakish large, blotting out the sky. Never (again) Northway Mall including the streets leading to it. Without needing to confer each understood: none of these routes was possible any longer by daylight.

  By night, one might drive anywhere. Or nowhere.

  Daylight in any part of the urban landscape had begun to cause eye strain, aching eyes, squinting eyes, visual malformations caused by an excess of (stinging) tears. Fugues of near blindness in bright sunshine, and then in not-bright sunshine, and then in dull-opaque daylight, finally in any degree of daylight at all.

  Debilitating headaches—cluster headaches, migraine. As if the very skull had been struck by an ax, baring the moist quivering vulnerable brain.

  Sunglasses helped temporarily, at the start. The wife purchased stylish new prescription grayish-pink lenses of the kind called “photochromic”—meaning that the lenses darken with the brightness of the sun. The husband purchased new prescription olive-tinted glasses, also “photochromic.”

  Yet even with “photochromic” lenses their eyes grew ever more sensitive to light. And so each began to wear lenses so dark that their eyes were hidden completely, like the eyes of the blind, and the frames of these glasses were large, masking one-third of their faces, like the faces of the guilty, who wish to pass among us incognito.

  So disguised, if they dared to venture out in daylight it was not surprising that people who knew them did not (seem to) recognize them. That people who knew them, or had once known them, might glance toward them without seeming to see them, as if, singly or together, they had become invisible.

  Not surprising, no one to blame, if friends/acquaintances/neighbors did not smile bravely at the couple—Why, hello! How are you! We have been thinking about you and meant to call. …

  Solace came only with darkness. When dusk yielded to the sweet oblivion of night.

  Whatever it was that had happened, however it had happened, in the bedroom at the top of the stairs in the late winter of the year, had happened at night.

  Happened was how they spoke of it. Passive, past tense.

  Like rain, hail, dripping eaves. Earthquake. Act of God.

  Yet, what had happened in the night was discovered only in the morning—“Just after 7:00 a.m. We are an early-rising family.”

  By which time it would be calculated that what had happened, that could not ever be reversed or undone, had happened approximately eight-nine hours before. Which was to say, between 10:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. of the previous calendar day.

  Through the (long) night unguessed at by the adults of the household.

  A rude surprise, at breakfast. The earthquake, at breakfast.

  The wife had been the one to make the discovery. Of course, it would be the wife. For it was nearing 7:30 a.m. and there’d been no sound, no footsteps overhead or on the stairs. The wife, who’d called upstairs. The wife, who’d then gone upstairs to see.

  “Breakfast time was always our happiest time. …”

  Never again breakfast, not even the possibility of breakfast, the very word breakfast an obscenity not to be muttered aloud.

  In fact any meal contemplated during daylight was likely to provoke nausea, breathlessness, choking. Loss of appetite came to be associated with daylight—the very smell of food repulsive.

  Daylight itself repulsive. Treacherous.

  The only solace came to be sleeping through daylight and only after dark rousing themselves sleep engorged and bloated like ticks that have feasted on blood not always knowing where they were, or when it was, or who the other was; for the consumption of alcohol (in her case, white wine; in his, whiskey) as well as barbiturates (“sleep aids”) had become the primary means of self-medication.

  Waking to find themselves in the room quaintly, comically, cruelly designated “master bedroom” of a size and dignity (bathroom adjoined) to set it apart from other, smaller, mere bedrooms in the house of which there were several including the room at the top of the stairs, which was no longer used as a “bedroom” or even as a “room.” Waking groggily, reluctantly in the (master) bedroom, which soon began to exude the smells of a sickroom though neither the husband nor the wife was (they would have insisted) sick. A double bed rarely changed now, that had been routinely, even religiously changed each Monday, with fresh-laundered fine-spun cotton sheets in (matching) colors and prints, and (matching) pillowcases. And a quilted green-satin comforter atop the bed now soiled, mysteriously grimy as if with food, blood, vomit stains, seen now solely by lamplight, which is a forgiving sort of light unlike the raw, unsparing light of day. Bedclothes dampened from sweaty dreams, sheets twisted by twitching legs, pillowcases grown sodden beneath heads leaking shame and anxiety like mucus. Underfoot in the perpetual twilight were miscellaneous socks, T-shirts, underwear—his; though similarly worn, soiled, hers were never tossed onto the floor with that cavalier air (the wife thought, observing her husband covertly) of mockery, derision.

  Her soiled things were hidden away in a hamper in the bathroom, in a proper reflex of shame. Her towels, though chronically damp, dirtied, beginning to fray, were yet hung properly on towel racks in the bathroom, while his were likely to have fallen to the floor in a heap and this heap kicked into a corner of the bathroom.

  Like a (small, sodden) body it was. Roadkill, possibly. Tossed to the side of the road.

  Yet, the husband was correct in such deportment. What did cleanliness, propriety, even a pretense of cleanliness and propriety, matter?

  If the wife should pick up the husband’s tossed-down laundry, holding her breath, reaching beneath the bed to retrieve a dirt-stiffened sock, if she should take up the moldering towels in a heap in the bathroom, would such good-wife self-abasement matter?

  Of course, it would not.

  What mattered was sleeping through the day. Not so very easy, to sleep through an entire day.

  Especially in hideous light-filled months: April, May. Pinnacle of daylight horror: June 21.

  What had happened in the room at the top of the stairs in the season of melting snow, dripping eaves, thunderous skies had seemed at the least to be fixed, permanent. There is that—the wife might say with a bitter sort of joy. For here was a promise of finality, the worst that might happen, that had happened, had the power, or should have had the power, to stop time. Yet—time had not stopped.

  Not in the slightest had time stopped. What a joke, to imagine that there was an entity—Time—that might choose to stop.

  Instead late, wintry March yielded by degrees to a warmer season. Befouled snow, dripping icicles at last—disappeared. Hard-frozen earth thawed, miniature shoots began to appear, the wife stared in disbelief at—what could these be?—a scattering of snowdrops vivid-whitely blooming amid the debris of winter beside the rear door of the garage. … As the brain damaged are not likely to comprehend the blow of the sledgehammer that has damaged their brains so the wife and the husband could not comprehend this stunning betrayal—a new season?

  Where in a late winter o
f occluded skies a stuporous kind of dark-muck sleep was possible, this sleep became, even with self-medication, ever more elusive in a season of obscenely bright skies. Eight hours of sleep was a challenge. Nine, ten hours a fantasy wish. Eleven hours, a triumph rarely achieved.

  By mutual consent, neither chose to swallow a half dozen chunky white barbiturates, or more. Neither chose to obliterate consciousness altogether. No words, no speech, instinctively they shrank from such a remedy for the pain of nightgrief.

  Someone has to remember. If there is no one …

  Waking too soon, the heart pounded in dismay, disgust. If the light of late afternoon was still discernible through minute cracks in the venetian blinds.

  Tightly the blinds were drawn to prevent light leaking in. Tightly in all the windows of the house, not just in the (master) bedroom. A savage tightness as the husband readjusted the blinds to draw them tighter. The wife whimpered as if the husband were drawing something tight, tighter around her neck—but to no avail, the husband did not hear. Daylight was the enemy the husband would defeat. Slats in the blinds broke and had to be mended with duct tape.

  A kind of radioactive light was indeed leaking into the house, an obvious poison. The wife began to wear the oversized dark-dark glasses in the house, during the (obscene) hours of the day when sleep failed her and cast her out forlorn as a mangled creature on a littered beach when the tide has gone out. The husband cursed at infinitesimal motes of light glimmering through blinds drawn to the windowsills and stomped from room to room nailing blankets over the windows, the darkest blankets he could find, the largest bath towels to keep out the despised light.

  Hammering!—the husband did love to hammer. (Was this love new? The pleasure of gripping the wooden handle of the clawhammer, certainly new. Having taken leave of his daylight work to sink into the more exhausting labor of nightgrief, the husband had energy to spare.) The wife cringed, pressing her hands against her ears. Pain darted inside her skull like lightning. Such fury in the husband’s hammering, the wife feared he was striking at her head with the clawhammer as he pounded nails into the wall, securing a blanket or a towel in place. The husband was methodical, precise. There is a particular fury in precision.