“I haven’t been well. I’ve been having some problems. My days have been full of problems.” Etta seemed determined to avoid eye contact. I watched as a leaf over her right shoulder let go of its branch and lazily spun down towards the surface of the stream. Her arm shot out like a mongoose and she snatched it out of the air.

“Here,” she said, and she stood up and turned around and stuck it behind my ear. She gave the impression of smiling intensely, almost freakily, but it was all in the set of her chin and the lines around her eyes. I didn’t really have a response to this. I wished she would sit back down.

“Uh, I’m sorry to hear that,” I told her. “What…what kinds of problems?”

“You know. The kind that mess you up.” She tapped the ember of her cigarette onto the carpet of brown pine needles and I ground it out with my foot. “Problems with the Man. I’m a wanted fugitive. Did you know that?”

“This isn’t really how I imagined our ten-year reunion,” I said. “We’re supposed to be trying to out-bullshit each other. I tell you that my four year old just tested into his preschool’s gifted program, you tell me about your recent promotion to Assistant Supervisor of Cell Phone Sales and CEO Fast-Tracking. Also, it should be indoors.”

“Also, there should be about a hundred and fifty more people.”

“Not necessarily. I’m okay with this many.” She came pretty close to a smile at that. Somewhat close.

“Ask me about the fugitive part,” she said, turning back to watch the stream.

I looked at my watch. It was 7:33 in the evening and the sun was teetering on the edge of South Mountain. Great golden shafts of light streamed down, gilding the hemlocks. A quiet breeze raised the hairs of my forearms – the chilly, resigned exhalation of the mountain. Half a mile away frogs were having sex. If only it would make the occasional effort, I thought, the world could be a halfway decent place to live.

“Okay, tell me about the fugitive part.”

She sat back down and this time I sat down beside her. I handed her a broken pine branch and she used it to tickle the water.

“No, I was making that up,” she said. “I was trying to out-bullshit you.” She sucked at her cigarette and pushed up her glasses. “I only wish I was a fugitive. I kind of feel like I’ve missed my chance to really fuck some shit up, and soon I’ll be thirty and no one will take me seriously anymore. Like, I’ll try to join a radical animal liberation terrorist cell and all the kids will think I’m a narc.”

“No one will think you’re a narc. They don’t even have narcs anymore. If they want to find out if you’re going to blow up a pharmaceutical plant, they just listen to your phone calls.” I shifted uncomfortably. I felt like I was missing the point.

“You’re missing the point,” Etta said. “Listen, I remember when we were like eight and your dad got his pants caught in the harvester, and you missed school for two weeks and our whole class put our lunch money in a pretzel bin to buy flowers for the funeral. And I came over to your house and we were going to go play in the garage and your mom was in there just kind of staring at all those canvases that he started painting and didn’t ever finish. And then we went out behind the grain silo instead.”

It was true. We went out behind the grain silo instead. Etta kissed me out behind the grain silo, I now realize, because she didn’t know anything better to do. I threw a corncob at her.

“I get it,” I said. “But you’re not going to get killed by a harvester. Look, you’ve done a lot of things with your life. You’re twenty-eight. I heard that you worked as the only female rodeo clown in Arizona for a while. That’s something.”

She stood up, sighed, chucked the pine branch into the stream. A congregation of startled crayfish exploded away from it in a burst of mud. She looked down at me. A halo of milkweed spores illuminated her from behind. When she spoke she sounded like the angel of bad news.

“You’ve changed,” she said. She had me there.

“I’m sorry,” I told her.

“Don’t say, ‘I couldn’t help it,’” she said.

“I wasn’t going to,” I said. But I had been thinking about it.

“I shouldn’t be so surprised. I just, I don’t know, I thought we’d go rob banks together. I have no idea what comes next,” she said, “and I’m scared, okay, I’ll admit that, I’m pretty scared. Pretty terrified. Got it?”

“Um.” I was still sitting down and my butt was getting wet. “Do you want a ride back to town?”

“Forget it,” she said. “I’m going to go get eaten by wolves. Do they have wolves here? Mountain lions? Deer? I guess they all got run over.” She strode forward into the stream, splashing water all over my trousers. “Something better get me,” she said, without turning back, when she was halfway across.

I watched her cross the stream and disappear among the skirts of the hemlocks, her bearing fixed on the ridge of South Mountain. What could I do? The most I could hope for was to ruin my shoes. I have never been good at helping people with their problems.

The sun was gone for good. Fifteen miles to the south, under a humming yellow lamp, my mother was waiting up for me on the porch of our old house. She was drifting off to sleep, and she needed someone to wake her up and take her inside and play a few hands of gin rummy with her and put her to bed. I got up, brushed off my damp trousers, and followed the path back up the bank to the parking lot.

this is a fake in-memoriam for randy coleman’s retirement blog

The year was 1962, the place was Schenectady. I’d been working in pest control by day and shacking up with an alcoholic dancer named Pauline by night. In my pocket I carried a tiny notebook in which I placed a tally mark every time she didn’t respond to something I said.

I was on my second notebook by the time I got assigned to the Coleman place. Vince, my dispatcher, told me to bring four tanks of imiprothrin, a pair of galoshes, and a cyanide capsule, just in case. Randy lived over on the eastern edge of the city, in a rathole flat above a 24-hour pawn shop called Make Or Break’s. I meant to knock twice, but he swung open the door after only one.

In those days Randy looked nothing like he does today. His most notable characteristics were his dreaming, unassuming eyes and his painfully twisted back – a deformity attributed to a childhood bout with scoliosis, which would be suddenly and miraculously healed years later following a mushroom trip in the Himalayas.

He was cleanshaven, which I found odd, considering the bohemian trappings of his apartment. On an easel in the corner rested a canvas draped with a cloth, in which holes had been cut such that only very small portions of the painting underneath were visible at any given time. Candle butts were melted into the ceiling and the walls. In the kitchen I found a hifi stereo with an axe through it.

After a cursory inspection of the apartment turned up no infestation, I asked Randy for more details as to the specific nature and location of his pests. A rambling, near-incoherent monologue-cum-rant followed, by the end of which I was forced to conclude that the creatures plaguing this man were in reality the hallucinatory manifestations of the dozens of pieces of music gestating in his mind at the moment. I sat on a wooden milk crate while he described them to me, his eyes tracking them around the room: a bat-winged myna bird screeching from atop the doorjamb, a blue cat with six legs scurrying under the armoire.

It was hours before I left, retracing my steps through the snowy streets, lugging the imiprothrin back to the pest control offices. Stray dogs padded past without looking at me, yellow in the sodium lamps. When I arrived home, dawn was melting over the horizon and Pauline was gone. She’d taken my wallet and my record collection.

Feb 13, 10:15-10:30pm

My brother falls down a well in the hard light of Christmas morning while I roll across the empty left side of our bed and dream about oxen steaming through the night. Neither one of us can remember falling asleep the night before. In our stomachs spaghetti knots like a tangle of yarn and we viciously kick each other’s shins to warm up under our cold blankets.

“I can hear them wrapping things down there.”

“That’s not them, they’re not the ones who wrap the presents.”

“Shut up.”

“Listen! Really, that was a sleighbell.”

“That was somebody bumping against the tree.” At a certain point we tire out and go limp, each of us holding the other one like a stuffed animal.

He wakes up as the first razor of sun crests the far-off bumpy mountain range and quietly disengages from me. Down the stairs in his bare feet, right past the thermostat and into the immense holy presence of the tree which has burst up from our floorboards like a vital middle finger defiantly raised against the obstinately snowy world outside. We find the torn paper of his first gift, a green pair of rubber boots from Woolworth’s, near the rocking chair. He’s stepped on the ribbon and dragged it outside with him…it finally lets go of the boot’s sole halfway across the backyard, where it bleeds up at us from the inside of his footprint.

His trail traces a wild skirling path through the yard, around the stubble of the dead garden, into the trees at the edge of our property, to their final destination: the black eye staring up from the ground, the hole-in-one, the drain that we always tilt towards when we’re not watching.

Missed connections 5

You crawled out of a pumpkin – m4w – 24

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Reply to: pers-489560763@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-11-26, 1:31AM CST

On Friday I was walking home from the train in a bit of a drizzle, paying attention to the stray cats and stoplights exuding their radiance, everything doubling in size at each moment, with my keys in my pocket. In an alley off 31st Street skulked a big black dumpster, and next to it sat a beautiful pumpkin the size of a bass drum.

Somebody was throwing it away, so I decided to carry it home, scrub it, and make it into several dozen pies. I took two steps towards it, and then I saw a thin line around the stem where the top had been cut off, then replaced. I watched as the lid gave a wiggle, rose an inch, slid to the side, tottered, and fell to the wet pavement. Seconds later, your head, in perfect profile, rose matter-of-factly from the hole in the pumpkin. You unfolded yourself, popping shoulders into place, brushing stray seeds from your jacket and strands of pulp from your hair. One leg and then the other rose, and you stepped out of the pumpkin and into the haze of the city.

Clearly I was in no position to say anything to you, but you turned your head and held my gaze for an indeterminate moment before giving me a half smile, then walked briskly down the alley to get lost in all that baffling and grimy plumbing. Your eyes were orange. If there’s any chance that I might see you again, please write to me.

• it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

PostingID: 489560763

Stories in the Old House, Part Two: the Half-Heiress

Neighbors make neighborhoods, but the Awbury Arboretum isn’t much of a neighborhood, and the people who live there keep mostly to themselves. This isn’t to say that there aren’t occasional rituals that bring families together: barbecues, a jazz festival, and, fittingly enough for this community of old stone buildings and unlit streets, a well-coordinated Halloween with costumes and tours of haunted houses for the kids. Still, families mostly point inward in the suburban fashion, and I never felt any pressure, growing up, to hang around with the other kids who lived around us. I knew our immediate neighbors, the Scattergoods, because their kids went to my high school, but other than that I barely knew the faces, let alone the names, of the five or six families who lived within the walls of the Arboretum.

One summer, when I was in early high school, my mother told me that one of our neighbors to the northwest wanted someone to babysit their daughter for a night. I was young enough that the thirty bucks they were offering seemed like a lot of money, so I said I’d do it. At six o’clock I put my summer reading books into a backpack and walked outside. The week before, lightning had hit one of the large oaks in the backyard, snapping it low on the trunk, and the vast bulk of it was lying in the grass. Its limbs dug into the ground like roots from the force of the impact.

“That Matty girl is hell on wheels, I hear,” my mom told me as I left. She warned me to be sure to enforce strict discipline.

“Don’t worry, Ma,” I told her.

“You’re just too nice a person,” she called after me, as I shut the door.

The old houses of the Arboretum are all clustered around what used to be long dirt roads; the main private drive, Awbury Road, was paved sometime in the twentieth century, but the other road was deemed unworthy of the same treatment, and stretches from the heart of the park to the northwest edge without meeting any driveway or tributary, one unbroken line of dirt.. For those other houses not connected to the main, paved roads, the owners have built their own driveways, unconnected to any interior road, directly to the busy city streets surrounding the park. The net effect of this turning outward is to close these distant houses to the rest of the Arboretum. Surrounded by groves of trees, the only way to reach those far properties is to walk from backyard to backyard, through small pathways cut into the tree line.

So I slipped out of my backyard and onto one of those narrow, wooded paths that cut between houses in the secluded northern section of the Arboretum. The ground beneath me smelled of leaves that had been left to rot undisturbed. I passed a crumbling shed, vines climbing its walls, its windows broken through by the branches of a tree growing inside it. In the twilight the hanging trees made a low tunnel; everything inside it was shaded and dim, and the light at the end looked flimsy, the lazy sun of a summer evening.

Once out of the tunnel, the property of that family to the northwest – I’ve forgotten their names, except for their daughter – opened up. I don’t know how much of it belonged to them and how much of it was the public property of the Arboretum – this was always an issue for the families who lived there – but there was a long stretch of green running up to the house, regardless. There were two weeping willows, one close to me, drifting across the image of the house like a beaded curtain over a girl’s room, the other farther on, past the house itself, shaking in the background.

The house had the ramshackle feeling common to almost all the arboretum homes. Built for rich people of a certain kind, they had been inherited by rich people of another kind entirely: alimony cases, like my mother, tenured professors, people who didn’t mind a little disrepair here and there. Even from a distance I could see that the veranda porch had a couple of obvious loose posts, and as I got closer it was clear that no one had used it for some time; boards had broken on the porch itself and been pulled off, like a piano with missing keys. There was one irregular turret growing from the right side of the third floor, and its windows were broken and boarded. Probably large parts of it were sectioned off and unused.

The parents were already ready to go. The woman, who had carrot-orange hair, cut short with bangs, was sitting on the front steps and jangling her keys against her thigh. She wore sunglasses and a pale pink tank top with her khaki shorts, and her style wasn’t much different from the girls I went to school with; for all I knew, she could have been wearing those sorts of clothes her whole life.

“Oh Sam,” she said, standing, as if she was surprised I’d showed up. “You’re here. Great.”

She held up her car keys and smiled.

“As you can see, we’re sort of rushing, so I left some notes on the fridge. It shouldn’t be too difficult. Matty’s already had her dinner, and she seems like she’s in a quiet mood tonight.”

“Thank the lord,” her husband said, emerging from the doorway. He was shaking his head as he mumbled the words. His brown beard was thick and only half trimmed, and he had the insomniac look: thick, dark circles and heavy lids.

His wife shot him a look that would have taken years to really understand, although the general impression wasn’t positive. I was suddenly glad to be staying in the house and not going with them to dinner. It didn’t seem like it would be a particularly pleasant experience.

“Thank you so much for helping us out like this,” the woman said to me, through gritted teeth.

“Don’t mention it,” I said.

I waved to them as they pulled out of the driveway. It struck me that I didn’t know where they were going, when they would be back, or how to contact them. It was that time of the evening when your eyes see less than you think they do, and they just disappeared down the black length of the driveway.

The girl, Matty, opened the screen door and stepped outside. She had the same orange hair as her mother, and she was wearing a summer dress with big blue flowers all over it. She crossed one skinny leg over the other and waved at me.

“Hi,” she said. “Are my parents gone?”

“Yeah,” I said. “They just left.”

“Okay,” she said. “I was reading. In the living room.”

“I see,” I said.

“You don’t really have to watch out for me,” she told me, and turned on her heel and went back inside.

Following her in, the smell of the house surrounded me, a combination of curry and cardoman from that night’s dinner, a little dust on the old wood, and the same kind of incense my mother sometimes burned to cover up other odors. The ceilings were even higher than in my house, towering over me and the girl. Unlike my parents, who had dealt with the high walls by hanging large, imposing paintings on them, Matty’s parents had left them more or less bare. Even the furniture, a low coffee table and soft, sagging armchairs, clung to the ground as if shrinking away from the empty space. At one end of the living room, completely surrounded by the frame of a non-working fireplace, was a TV that looked like it had been around since the seventies. It was about two feet square, and had dials instead of buttons.

“Do you want to watch TV?” Matty asked me. She was lying on her stomach with a big, leather-bound book opened in front of her. She had caught me looking.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve just never seen a TV in a fireplace before.”

“It only gets black and white,” she told me. “It’s not a very good TV.”

“I think I’ll just get a glass of water,” I told her. “What are you reading?”

She held the book up so I could see the words on its spine: The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson.

“Wow,” I said.

“It’s pretty good,” she said, shrugging.

I went into the kitchen, shaking my head. The note Matty’s parents had left was taped to the refrigerator. It was really nothing more than a couple of emergency numbers and the name of the restaurant they were going to. No mention of when they would be home.

The kitchen was even stranger than the living room. The cabinets along the walls were so tall they were impractical. When I opened them up to look inside it was clear that nobody stored anything on the top shelves. The island in the middle of the floor looked expensive, large and solid, with drawers and cabinets emerging on every side. A knife was lying on the countertop, bits of basil clumped along its edge, and little green lines following the path of the knife criss-crossed the polished wood. I looked straight out through the bay windows onto the lawn, which seemed a little neglected. So did the windows themselves; the panes were dusty, and the paint job was rough and patchy, as if someone had forgotten to sand and had held the brush with an unsteady grip.

There was a metal kettle on the counter next to the sink. When I was a kid, living in the country, I had known people who used coffee percolators, but it had been years since I had seen one. I tapped my finger against the sides. It was still hot. I took a mug with the Weavers Way logo and poured myself a cup.

I heard the scratch of a needle dropping onto a record, and as I leaned against the island and sipped my coffee the sounds of a string quartet began to wind up quietly in the other room.

Walking back into the living room, I saw Matty leaning over the record player, which sat on a small chest in the far corner. Having dropped the needle, she carefully lowered the plastic cover, stepped back from the turntable, and began to slowly edge the volume up on the stereo. There were four brown speakers, one at each corner, surrounding us. The warm sounds of strings, their melodies intertwining, began to circle the room.

“Do you have any homework?” I asked.

“I already did it,” she told me, her eyes turned back to her book.

I lay back in the armchair and looked up at the high ceiling. There was no overhead light, only the illumination of three tall floor lamps, and the shadows and light swelled and receded as the lamps blended into each other. Outside, the summer night was beginning. I could see the upper windows of my house through the trees, under peaked gables, looking ghostly through the windblown branches.

“You live over on the road, don’t you?” Matty asked me. I hadn’t been paying attention, and when I turned to her she had the book closed and pushed aside and was considering me.

“Yeah,” I said. “I live at 5 Awbury.”

“The big house,” she told me. “I know about it.”

“Oh really?” I asked, teasing her.

“You know, you have ghosts. My parents told me.”

I paused and narrowed my eyebrows. She looked very serious all of a sudden.

“What kind of ghosts?” I asked.

“My parents won’t tell me,” she said. “They just told me that there are ghosts in your house.”

“Well, I’ve never seen one,” I said.

“That’s why I’m not supposed to go on the path at night,” she told me.

“Well, like I said,” I told her, “I’ve never seen one.”

“Maybe that’s because you don’t have the gift,” she told me. “Maybe you’re not sensitive enough.”

“Have you ever seen one?” I asked her.

“No,” she said, looking at the floor. “There aren’t any ghosts here.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

Once I saw her face I regretted saying it. It was obviously something she had thought about herself. She set her face against the question, but there was a hint in her eyes, and in the way she tucked her thumbs into her fists, that she had spent some time considering the possibility.

“My parents told me there aren’t,” she said.

“Well, they know better than we do,” I said.

She nodded, but the way I said it, and the way she reacted, made us both realize that we didn’t believe a word of it. I sipped my coffee. With a slight friction, a trembling inside the speaker, the needle lifted off the record.

“The side’s over,” I told her. “Do you want me to flip it?”

“Nah,” she said, getting to her feet. “Do you want to play a game?”

“Sure,” I said. “What kind of game?”

“Flashlight tag,” she told me. “I’ll get the flashlights.”

I heard her banging up the stairs, and then a rustling in some distant closet. She came back with two heavy-duty flashlights, one yellow, one orange.

“You know how to play, don’t you?”

“Refresh my memory,” I told her.

“When you’re it,” she told me, slowly, as if I was a young or stupid person, “you turn on your flashlight. When you hit the other person with your light, they’re it.”

“So the person who’s running, they keep their flashlight off?”

She rolled her eyes.

“Obviously.”

“Okay,” I told her. “I get it.”

We walked out together onto the grass. It was high firefly season, and it seemed like there were hundreds of them, filling the air with a pulsing cloud of light.

“You be it first,” she told. “Close your eyes and count to twenty.”

I did like she asked. There was a light breeze at my neck, but the night was still muggy and close and full of buzzing insects. You could hear cicadas chirring, and the mosquitoes were landing on the backs of my legs.

I reached the end of my count. Circling the crumbling veranda porch, I swung the beam of my flashlight around, trailing it across the grass and onto the layered leaves hanging from the far tree line. Their lawn extended a couple hundred feet in all directions, and I might have lost her entirely if I hadn’t been able to follow the sound of her feet on the grass and her occasional quiet laughter. The grass was a little high, and spotted her and there with clover. With the flashlight sifting through the darkness I felt like a search party, someone investigating the night.

Finally I caught her, trying to glide under the hanging branches of the weeping willow.

“Okay,” she said, a little out of breath. “I’ll count.”

She stood against the trunk of the willow and started her loud countdown. Switching off my flashlight, I circled the house. I was surprised at how much my eyes could adjust, even after watching such a small beam of light. I could see the fence through the trees, and beyond that the suggestion of the Cope House, past the dirt road. I could see the broken boards on the veranda porch. Only the spaces inside the windows of the house, looking up, were too dark to make out.

I heard her intone the last number of her count, and I slipped off again through the grass. I took off my shoes and put them by the front steps, listening to her tramping around the circle of lawn. It was almost too easy to hear where she was going. The beam of her flashlight swept around the far side, and I picked my way around the stone and slipped between two pillars on the porch.

Without a light, and knowing you were being pursued, it was a completely different kind of game. The beam of Matty’s flashlight hanging on leaves and branches in search of me made me feel like a part of the night, like slipping into a hedge and disappearing, melting bodily into the wood and stone of the house and peering out between cracks in the masonry.

“Hey,” she began to call. “Hey!”

Letting out a deep breath, I peeled myself away from the slats of the veranda porch and began to run wildly into the night, towards the tiny pathways that criss-crossed the arboretum. I heard her excited gasp, and then the searchlight swung across, blinding me.

“Got you! Thought you could get away, did you now?”

She had an excellent approximation of an English policeman.  I found myself laughing even though I was out of breath.

“Now you hide,” I told her.

“You took a long time.”

“That’s because I’m so good,” I said, putting my face in my hands, my lips almost touching the cool stone of the house. I counted loudly, feeling the rough walls with the pads of my fingers.

When I finished and turned my beam onto the plain of grass, she was completely gone. I stood very still and trained my ears to the sound of footfalls, or giggling, but the whole place was silent. She was hiding somewhere, I knew, keeping quiet in some sheltered spot. I went from side to side, letting the beam sweep lazily over bushes and trees. When I focused on the sounds of the park, the buzz of insects and the occasional knocking together of the small branches, I found I could hear the tidal sound of cars washing in from the road below us.

I sat down against the trunk of the willow, slowly casting my flashlight around the lawn like I was conducting a sleepy waltz. I knew that I wouldn’t find her unless she wanted me to.   She knew this part of the park and I didn’t. I knew, too, listening to the sound of the cars moving down the road on their way from one part of the waking world to another, that we were both stranded in the orbit of this old, crumbling house, creeping around in the darkness, until someone decided to discover us again.

Finally, her reedy voice came out from the cover of the trees.

“Are you giving up?” she asked me. “Are you worried yet?”

She wasn’t far, but far enough. I sent my little light up against the trees where I thought I heard her voice, but all I could see was the surface layer of leaves, swaying in the wake of a small breeze.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

When my mother decided to move out of her house, during her last days of residency, I liked to ask her nagging questions I had about the history of my old home: what were the older owners like, and how had it ended up the way it was when my mother bought it, half crumbled like many of the other houses in the Arboretum, covered with creeping ivy?

That was how I heard about the old recluse who had died in the upper room, and how I had grown to imagine his death, who had found him and under what circumstances. It was how I learned about the young millionaire who had died of a heart attack while playing polo, who had planned on renovating our house for his illegitimate daughter as a sort of minor inheritance. Instead, the girl’s mother had been forced to sell it to my mother, for one reason or another.

My mother never knew the details of the girl and her mother.

“She seemed like she was lost,” she told me, about the mother. “I don’t think she really knew what she was doing.”

About the daughter she didn’t say much of anything, only shook her head and said it was a shame, a kid being involved in something like that. So it was the daughter I wondered about, owning a house and then losing it.

There were plenty of strange children in the Arboretum when I was growing up. A woman who lived down the street, a quiet woman who was escaping a bad marriage, had a little boy who used to come over and play with my little brother. He had a habit of mimicking dinosaurs while playing with other people, groaning and making his hands into Tyrannosaurus fingers, retreating from the group and turning in circles in some sort of private game. I babysat for him once or twice, too, and heard him talk, obliquely, about his long-gone father. He brooded the whole time I was in his house, barely speaking to me.

There were a couple of kids, brother and sister, the girl around my age and the boy a little younger, who moved into the apartments above the Cope House when I was in eleventh grade. They were Christians of a conservative kind, home-schooled and deathly sober. Sometimes she wore a bonnet, but I don’t know if this was a personal or religious decision. Her skin was so pale it was almost transparent; you could see blue veins in her face. They would come over to my house and drink juice and we would walk around the yard talking, the girl and me, with her little brother trailing behind us.

“My parents are looking for a better place,” she told me. “We’ll be moving soon.”

She would admit to me, sometimes, that the place scared her, that she had a hard time sleeping at night. She told me these things as if they were a sign of personal weakness, and I never brought them up with her after she told me. Eventually she disappeared, too, without warning, so that it was weeks before I asked my mother where she had gone to, while she was in the middle of chopping carrots.

“You mean the Cope House girl?” she asked me.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I don’t know,” she told me. “I never really knew their family. Were they Mennonites?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Some people just don’t take to this place,” she told me, matter-of-factly, and went back to her work.

So there were always children passing through, it seemed, dragged by their parents into these crumbling houses, living for a while with the close presence of the past.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

It was almost midnight before Matty’s parents pulled up into the driveway. Matty was asleep on the couch, the lights were dimmed, and I was reading the Dickinson she had left on the floor. It was comfortable, but the longer the hours got the more the night seemed to press in on the windows, the more I felt anxious, entertaining the irrational feeling that her parents maybe weren’t coming back at all.  I was happy, at first, to see her parents pulling up the drive.

Matty didn’t wake up, but moved a little in her sleep. The car door slammed, and I heard her mother confront her husband with a harsh whisper.

“Can’t you be quiet?” I thought she said. He mumbled in response.

She pushed the screen door open slowly with great care, and looked in on me with a smile.

“The girl’s asleep, is she?”

I nodded. Her mother’s smile was broad but her teeth were gritted, and her eyes were red. Her father stayed outside and smoked a cigarette.

“Well, let me go get some money out of the drawer,” she said, and went past me into the kitchen. I stayed in the entryway and looked out at Matty’s father, who leaned against one of the pillars of the porch and looked out at the woods. It looked like he was waiting for something. His brown hair was going bald on the top, and he slouched as he leaned, his shoulders hunched.

Her mother came back with an envelope.

“I hope she wasn’t too much trouble,” she whispered.

“Not at all,” I told her. “She was great.”

“We worry, sometimes,” she said. “That she doesn’t have enough kids to play with. I know it’s a lot to ask somebody your age to entertain her, but she really appreciates it.”

I nodded.

“This can be a lonely place,” she said.

“I suppose so.”

She nodded and looked at her feet for a second. Then she shook her head and began to dig into the white envelope.

“Can’t have you going without this,” she said, putting the thirty dollars in my hand, plus a five I pretended not to notice. “Thanks again for all your help.”

I thanked her for the money and started out the door. I hadn’t gotten twenty feet across the lawn when her father called after me.

“Not too far away, is it?” he said. There was an unaccountable edge to his voice. “We’re pretty tight knit around here, huh?”

I turned and looked at him. The porch light hit him from on top, highlighting the bags under his eyes. He looked like a much older man than he had earlier in the evening.

I never learned what he meant by the statement, but whatever it was he reconsidered it, and, looking a little embarrassed, gave me a mock-military salute.

“Come around whenever you like,” he said. “We appreciate the company.”

“Sure,” I said, beginning down the path, happy to be gone from that place, going home to sleep.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I never went over to Matty’s house again. When that summer finished senior year was a busy time, and like I said, there were never too many chances to meet the neighbors in the park, never too many reasons to walk down the paths to their houses.

One day, while I was away at college, one of Matty’s family’s dogs, an old, senile terrier, wandered into our yard and made the mistake of snarling in a weak way at our one hundred and twenty pound German Shepard, who nearly tore its throat out. The veterinary bills were gigantic, and though my parents paid them, the whole incident soured neighborly relations. Sometime later, before my graduation, Matty’s family moved away.

Despite the whole cast of lost children – the small boy with his dinosaur noises and inexplicable patches of silence, the Mennonite girl with her skin like pale paper, among others I don’t have time to mention now – Matty makes more appearances than anyone when I consider the kids who lived in the park when I was there, who played in its patches of forest and slept under the high ceilings of its houses.  She, more than anyone, seemed to belong there, to have made piece with the place on its own terms.  I think a lot about what she said about being sensitive, or having the gift.  I know that I would never have hidden in the dark woods at night at ten, slinking through the bushes while someone tried to find me with a flashlight.  And I wonder at how she evaded the questions I asked about ghosts, and whether she had seen one.

The strangest thing, too, is that it’s her face that I think of when I imagine the half-heiress who used to occupy my house, who I picture looking out into my backyard as I’ve been looking out at it in these last few weeks of high summer, the fireflies in full fanfare, their trailing lights about to fade as the autumn edges toward us. Maybe it has to do with her insistence that my house was haunted, or still is.

I imagine the mother of the half-heiress as my mother says she was, lost and tired, convalescing in the master bedroom. As she turns under the sheets, almost asleep, the half-heiress is on the first floor, walking from room to room. She runs her hand along the leaves of potted plants. She puts a record on the turntable. She stands on the ends of her toes to drop the needle on the vinyl, and then lowers the plastic covering. Outside night is falling; car engines swell and ebb among the hum of insects. The half-heiress watches the fireflies pulsing above the grass, accustomed to being left alone to watch the park at nightfall. The record starts with a crackle, but before the music begins to swell, filling the high room. the needle lingers on a black band of silence. Stuck in the gap, trapped somehow in a past that people only notice in glimpses, the half-heiress waits for time to catch up with her.

Stories in the Old House, Part One

My mother’s house stands in the middle of the Awbury Arboretum, a 55-acre park at the edge of the Germantown area of Philadelphia, part of the inexplicable northwest section of the city that juts out from the rest of the metropolitan area like an axe handle. Riding the R7 train to the Washington Lane stop, one passes through North Philadelphia, with its sudden blank patches like exposed gums, crossing Wayne Avenue, until the line runs roughly parallel to Germantown Avenue, the arterial that connects Germantown with Mt. Airy before rising into sleepy, whitewashed Chestnut Hill.

Passing the Germantown stop, the train glides by a baseball field – dramatic at night, with the soft haze of lights on green grass – the stone steeple of the local Catholic church, and a couple of large lots rimmed with barbed wire. Then, suddenly, a stone wall edges against the tracks, and from the right side of the train passengers can see a line of green over the top of the weathered masonry. As the train begins to slide to a stop, the wall tapers down and then turns to the northeast, and the scenery opens up to reveal the rolling hill of a park.

After the squeal of the air brake and the settling of the stopped train, passengers disembarking get their first unobstructed view of the Awbury Arboretum, its open southwest section, with a pond at the near corner that sends out the round, throaty sounds of frogs. Once the train creeps away, the lights from the other side of the tracks lie across the entrance to the arboretum, two wooden poles with a chain across them to keep cars away. There are no lights inside the park, except for the orange lights of the houses at its center, sometimes visible through the tree line.

To get to my mother’s house, you walk into the park, go a few feet up the main arboretum road, and then turn off onto a poorly paved side path that rises up the southwest hill, sticking closely to the tree line on the right. Eventually the patchy asphalt disappears completely into the grass, leaving you to pick your way up the hill, bending around patches of brush.

The arboretum staff mow a circular path through the southwest portion of the park to clear the way for dog-walkers and other visitors, but otherwise the grass is left to grow as high as possible, blocking the view of the road and the bottom of the hill. As you pick your way up towards the houses on the top of the hill, the only hints of the city are occasional car horns from the street below, and the orange glow that hangs above you. You rarely meet anyone on the path, but if you did it would be in the kind of space one tries to avoid in the city: a spot without eyes, just two people meeting each other in the dark.

The actual path through the tree line is difficult to find; though the path itself opens up into a clear mouth, the darkness and the encroaching brush make it hard to make out on a night with less than perfect moonlight. Once you find the path, you still have to contend with the low, overhanging branches, a sudden, half-hidden gate, and a series of jutting rocks that can catch your feet. The path itself is narrow, only about two feet wide, and it curves right, toward the lights of the arboretum’s houses.

Over the last ten years or so of living in this house on and off, I’ve come and gone thousands of times, and I’ve come to believe that this way- rising up to the lawn from the southwest park, on a relatively moonless night – is the best way to arrive. Not that there isn’t something to be said for the curving road that passes the other Awbury houses, especially when riding with people who are coming up to the house for the first time. That way, the bulk of the house reveals itself only gradually, from behind the facades of the other houses, from the southeast side. The car slides in directly past the front door, so that the full height of the facade is hard to see; stopping in front of wide double doors of the entryway, the front light hangs over the stoop and casts a sickly, yellowish light. If ever a car ride up to a city house could feel gothic, this one does.

But riding in a car, and having the recent memory of Chew Avenue, with its delis and pizza places and Chinese restaurants full of stoned kids buying Phillies, takes something from the whole experience, and in the end I prefer the walk up through the Arboretum from the train for preserving the illusion of entering a Victorian ghost story. The southwest route – dark woods, a winding path, and finally the gentle roll of the lawn upwards to the front facade of the house, gray stone and myriad windows that sometimes resembles a spider’s face – usually makes me stop for a second at the final end of the wooded path, next to my stepfather’s sunflowers, just to look. Considering that the city is close enough to dimly hear the roll of traffic, its a weirdly cloistered piece of land, crowned by the most imposing house I have ever lived in.

When I came up the path to the house last month, I felt a double sense of strange isolation, stepping out onto the long unmowed grass and looking up at the wide windows of my old house. My parents moved out months ago, and since I’ve been transient recently, waiting for my apartment to open up and for my job to begin again after a summer lull, I decided to move in for a month and look after the place. I had been warned that the place would be more or less empty, with certain rooms totally free of furniture, and even from the bottom of the lawn, looking up, it looked like a place that nobody lived in. Not only did it look like an uninhabited house, it looked as if being uninhabited were its natural state. It has always been a house that seemed more fitting for ghosts than living residents.

Without a key, the only way in was through the cellar storm entrance, lifting up a big wooden door and stumbling down the steps, picking my way through the cobwebby basement with its piles of boxes, and then rising up the inner cellar stairs into the first floor. Turning on the hall light lit up the entryway, the foot of the main stairwell that connects all three floors. The entryway itself is giant, with the shaft of the stairwell rising up to the roof and the actual ceiling itself twice as high as in your average house. It dwarfs you. So I stood there, hand on the switch, and felt very small. The stairs themselves led up to darkness.

I crept through the house, room by empty room. Some of them looked more or less as they used to, walls covered by my stepfather’s agit-prop paintings of Socialist leaders, furniture more or less intact. Others had been re-arranged to approximate normal living quarters, so that potential buyers wouldn’t feel too overwhelmed by emptiness. In one large room at the top of the house, two small chairs and a coffee table had been placed in the middle of a bare wood floor, facing a TV, seeming to shrink in the face of all the excess space. In another a twin bed stood shoved against a blank wall, the only light a bare, hanging bulb.

Other rooms, like my mother and stepfather’s bedroom, were completely empty. Out of their bay windows I could see the fence that edges the rest of the arboretum, and beyond it a light from the Cope House, the heart of the park, where people somtimes have weddings or other parties. That night it was empty, another wide stone edifice with dark windows.

There have been times, obviously, where I’ve lived in this house without my parents, housesitting for them during summers, watering the plants and watching the place. But always there was the sense of human habitation: dogs to be watched, my stepfather’s massive Lego structures, leftovers in the fridge. People had lived there before and would be coming back.

Without these signs, the house seemed swept clean, and the full power of the ridiculous scale of the place seemed to hang on every unseen corner and intricate edge of the many empty rooms. I walked into them and clapped to hear the echo respond, large and crisp. Everywhere I went, my shoes clapped once and then again, the house responding.

Long before my family lived in this house, the owner was an eccentric, a recluse. As well as I understand it, he lived exclusively on the top floor. He had a dumbwaiter built so that his servants could send food up to him, and a tube rising from the ground floor where they could place their ears and receive instructions. The dumbwaiter is gone, but the listening stations are still there, fixtures sprouting from the walls like white mouths, hanging half-open.

The owner, half-crazy to begin with, grew more and more reclusive as the years went on. The house itself was neglected. Ivy started to climb up the stone on all sides, and the wide veranda porch started to rot. Servants, I assume, must have quit. Finally, the owner died, alone, somewhere on the top floor.

I lived on this floor during my high school years, and I spent more nights than I care to admit wondering about the old owner, the eccentric recluse; specifically, I wondered about the circumstances of his death. How long had it taken his servants to find him, and in what condition? Had they gotten used to not seeing him for days, had they gotten used to living more or less on their own on the bottom floor, sending up meals twice a day, sometimes recieving nothing but silence in return?

The scenario I ended up imagining went more or less like this. The final faithful servants – many of them had quit, in response to the growing eerieness of the place and its reclusive owner – would be sending food as usual up to the third floor. Only after a few days, maybe even a week, when no plates were returning in the dumbwaiter, and no sounds at all were heard from the third floor, not even the slight creak of barefooted pacing that usually came from overhead, did they decide that somebody ought to break the usual ban on disturbing the master and go survey the situation.

The oldest servant, having known the master even in his infancy, assumed the burden. He crept slowly up the stairs, keeping his ears trained for the slightest noise that might tell him that no more was necessary, that everything was as it should be. Still, nothing stirred.

At the turn from the second floor up to the third, the oldest servant began to notice the unmistakable smell of the roast beef they had served the night before, and under that the overripe smell of old fruit. He turned his nose a little at some other, more rotten smells that lingered underneath those first two, growing worse the higher he climbed.

There was one thing I wasn’t sure of, that I debated as I lay in bed in my room, east of the main room on the third floor, just a dark hallway removed from where the old servant must have climbed, playing out the scene. Where would he have been, the old servant, I argued with myself, before he started to notice other smells beyond rotting food. It would depend, I supposed, on the season. If it was winter, maybe there would have been no smell at all. Maybe the house, hard to heat and always a little chill after November, would have preserved everything. But summer, the kind of balmy summer that defines Philadelphia, would have sent up an unmistakable stink, even after a few days. Would he have opened the door and smelled it? Or would he have already felt a dim premonition, padding carefully across the third floor hallway, fingers just touching the knob?

These were the sorts of things I wondered about, in the earliest morning when I couldn’t sleep, a morbid high-schooler with an overactive imagination. Brewing coffee in the newly empty house, with my parents almost as distant a presence as the old man who had died on the third floor, I sat at the kitchen table and ran through the story again. Occupying the lower floor, leaving the upper floors dark to save electricity, I felt like the one remaining member of the staff of a house with an absentee owner, a caretaker of ghosts. As the night settled into the arbitrary hours after midnight, I walked into the entryway, ready to climb the stairs to my bed, and passed close to one of those strange fixtures the old owner had installed to carry his commands. I ran my fingers over the aperture. What kind of whispering would I hear, I asked myself, if I just pressed my ear into that tiny opening and stood there, listening?

The Whole Town Underwater, Part 1

We had been subsisting for so long that we had pretty much given up on anything else, when the man showed up. My father was doing the books for the Walker Brothers, and in exchange we were fed fairly well, but there wasn’t any money to go around. My father had been a minister, but there wasn’t much work left in that capacity, other than the day to day process of caring for people’s souls. My father seemed to have lost interest in most of that anyway, along with the rest of the town. When the waters rose and everyone else abandoned the land, the Walkers took over the empty fields that were left. They consolidated. They were getting by that way. In fact, they were keeping the whole town afloat. The Walkers said that someday soon, when the produce lines were back in effect and there would be some point in sending product out to the city, then we would see some hard currency. But nobody knew when that day would be, and no one was altogether hopeful. The routine had been going on for years, and could go on for years longer. In the meantime the Walkers distributed food, which was the necessary thing.

It must have been difficult for the man to find his way to us. According to my geographic research, he would have had to turn off the interstate at Route 55, turn onto 48, go around a strange roundabout, past a succession of practically empty crossroads, and then, if he took a useless turn, he would end up riding into Wakeford. At night the plague of deer became a problem. We couldn’t keep up with hunting them in our reduced state. They darted across the roads and destroyed cars with suicidal glee, making people leery of driving at night. We heard stories of desperate strangers taking wrong turns and ending up wrecked by the side of the road, no medical help, no help of any kind. I myself had seen rusted out hulks on my bike rides about town, so I took the rumors as fact. People didn’t even ride cars much anymore; gas was in such short supply.

So it was a minor miracle that the man rode up in his mumbling Honda Civic one afternoon, parked in front of the abandoned Historical Society, and got out to sniff the air. That was what Mrs. Marshall, who runs the Marshall Store as a food collection and distribution center, said about him. He opened the car door and walked out into the air and took a big breath.

If you lived here you would understand. This close to the bay there is a taste of salt in the atmosphere, and also the wayward stink of falling ginko berries. People say it’s a unique sort of air. I can’t say; I’ve never lived anywhere else I can remember.

 

Much of my perspective came from my father. We drove into town for the first time when I was four, and I have no memory of any other house or town. He was a young minister ready to serve the Episcopal citizens of Wakeford, fresh from the seminary in the city, enraptured with the power of the written word of God.

“Country preachers make the Scriptures sound like an elementary school health class,” he had been fond of saying, but by those later days I am now speaking of, he himself seemed confused and unsure of the Lord’s word.

When he first arrived he was full of plans to explain what he called “the higher calling, half-hidden” to these fundamentally upright rural people, ill-served by poor communicators. But he only ministered for two years, barely made a dent, before the flooding and the mass exodus of people from town. Our personal run of bad luck.

 

With the day’s work on the Walkers’ calculations done, my father had his evenings free, and he sometimes took me along with him on his walks across town. He changed out of his work clothes, a white shirt and dress pants, into a worn pair of jeans and some threadbare flannel that he rolled up to his dry, skinny elbows. During his calculations he never ate or drank anything except tea.

“Get on out here, Finnegan,” he would say, and we would set out walking in one direction or another.

The land had been half emptied of people, and nature was in the process of reclaiming vast stretches of ground. Despite the Walkers’ best efforts, there wasn’t enough manpower or fuel to keep all the fields in working order, and as I followed my father, trying to copy his long, loose strides down the cracked white line of the roadside, I could see weeds and creeping vines – all manner of scrub and brush – rising up in the absence of crops.

We often followed a road that passed the abandoned Baptist church, taking the long way around the flood plain. The flood plain flowed for miles from the southwest, over what had once been the main square of town, a large field surrounded by four roads. All of this was now underwater. The only real landmark still standing was the Copeland House, which had stood on a high hill at the northeast end of the main square; with the raised water it came to look like a nicely appointed bed-and-breakfast with a bay view. The flood plain stretched out behind it.

These are mostly my father’s words of experience, which he explained to me: bed and breakfast, bay view. All I knew is what I could obviously see. Most of the houses submerged in the water had crumbled away; only a few roofs stood above the surface, and you could see it all from the side of the Copeland House. We walked and walked, until it grew dark.

“In the city, Finn,” he told me, “the night has a reddish sort of haze at the edges. All the light pollution. You can’t see any stars because of the smog, all the factories and cars going at once.”

“Even now?” I asked I knew people in the city would have to be rich to drive cars all day long, and that the factories had to be going through hard times, as we were.

“I suppose,” he said, kicking at the dirt.

Most of the time my father didn’t really entertain questions. He just wanted to tell a long story, sometimes in snippets, sometimes all at once for hours and hours. I only spoke to answer and agree.

But he was right about the stars. They shone out like someone stabbed the sky to expose some brilliant mystery beneath, hidden from us for our own good.

 

Bryan, the older Walker brother, rode his bike up to our house twice a week. The Walkers didn’t use gas except for agricultural work, and you could spot their twin road bikes, one red and one yellow, cutting across the town on errands every once in a while. Whenever Bryan came to our house he carried a big sheaf of paper in the front basket for my father.

Usually when he came my father was still in his study, poring over the last batch of paper they had brought, muttering to himself and flipping through the pages of various musty books. When the Walkers offered him the job managing their financial transactions – as a minister, he had a reputation for being smart – my father went all over town looking for volumes that might help him with his new duties. The town library, managed by Burt Gibbon, who had been a contractor and still was, from time to time, had a few useful books. He bartered for some others with Frank Edwards, a retired lawyer who scraped by deer-hunting and brewing strong beer.

By the time I turned fifteen, the summer when the man pulled up in his puttering car, he had a substantial collection, a cobbled-together business library. The books were worn, dusty, and out of date. My father had always been careful with his old hardbacks, using bookmarks, picking them gingerly from the shelves and smiling at the first soft crack of the pages as they opened. He treated the law books differently, stacking them in awkward piles on his desk, letting them fall to the floor as he muttered over the endless stacks of numbers.

Though the Walkers were the most important and respected people in a fifty-mile radius, Bryan always came up to our door with the look of someone who was afraid of being embarrassed.

“Mr. Walker’s here,” I would call.

My father would come to the door with his rolled-up white shirt, in no great hurry.

“How are you, Bryan?” he asked.

“Oh, doing just fine, Jack,” Mr. Walker said. “Got a new batch of numbers for you.”

“It never ends,” my father said, smiling weakly. “Not a break in sight.”

“No rest for the weary,” Mr. Walker told him.

And then Mr. Walker would wait, for some sign of friendship or impatience in my dad’s face. Sometimes my father would ask him if he’d like some water, and Mr. Walker would accept. But often enough, by virtue of his strange, inapproachable demeanor, my father would get the point across that he was busy enough with Mr. Walker’s work, and couldn’t be bothered with Mr. Walker himself. Though he never said anything to give that impression.

“Well,” Mr. Walker would say, touching the brim of his baseball hat, “I’ll leave you to it.”

“Sure,” my father said, letting the door close. “Have a nice day.”

And Mr. Walker would retreat, back to his bike, his hands in his pockets.

After he would leave, my father would pause in the entryway, peering off into the distance. He would look down at the sheets of paper in his hands and shook his head.

I could see all this from the kitchen where I had my books laid out. I’d gotten beyond the course of study my father had established, and by the summer of the strange man I only wrote about what I read, books I got my hands on all over town. People would give away their books at the first hint of interest in those days. They never knew what might happen, and they didn’t need any deadweight. So I had a library of my own. And always, at the corner of the table as I worked, was a King James Bible, though it was no longer encouraged. It was a habit I kept.

 

It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting, for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it in his heart. Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made glad. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning.

 

My father sometimes noticed me leafing through the pages, but he almost never said anything. He turned his face away. But he remembered, I know, from the things he sometimes said.

“Ecclesiastes is a mistake,” he said. “Although it’s beautiful. It should never have been included. A lucky mistake.”

“Solomon wrote it,” I told him, closing the book.

“No he didn’t,” my father shot back, taking some milk out of the freezer. He started humming to himself, snatches of songs that sounded religious, though they might not have been. He never sang words, only the tunes of forgotten songs, keeping them fresh in his mind.

He was right, I found out. Errors and omissions. My father had memorized all the lines a long time ago, but I lived in fear of flaws in the text, opening up unexpectedly before my eyes.

 

* * * * * * * *

The man asked around and found out about my father being the minister. That was what he told everyone, or tried to, handicapped by his thick foreign accent. Some people said he was Spanish, but a couple of people, Frank Edwards most notably, said it seemed more Eastern European. Frank Edwards was the established source for all things foreign, having traveled when he was younger.

“Where is the man with the church?” he asked people. Everyone tried to get him to understand that if he was looking for a minister he could find my father in the house next to Episcopal Church at the corner of Carpenter Lane and Main Street. It took a couple of people to guide him down, stop by stop, to where he wanted to go. He drove all the way, unsure of distances.

I didn’t see him arrive. It was Saturday, my free day, and I was out with my friend Micah in his canoe, drifting along where the bay meets the flood plain, going from house to underwater house, hitting unknown submerged objects with our paddles. We drifted out to the edge of the wrecked roofs, out to where the top of the marina office stuck out of the water. We tied ourselves to the last vestige of the old boathouse and sat there talking in the midday sun. Micah was younger, about twelve, but in the wake of the flooding there wasn’t much choice in friends. He was the only boy close to my age, a skinny, tan kid who was good with boats. His mom cut his hair using a bowl on top of his head, and his teeth were kind of crooked and jagged.

Micah and I were both readers, in our own separate ways. All of the television we could get in those days were emergency programs and depressing news. So we read, and told each other about what we had read.

“Marlowe is this guy who goes around saving lives in the city. He’s sort of on the wrong side of the law,” Micah told me. His dad was a mystery buff, and their house full of old paperbacks. “But he gets things done, that’s the important thing. Because he works outside the system.”

“Does he shoot people?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” Micah said. “Rarely.”

I have seen the wicked in great power,

and spreading himself like a green bay tree.

 

There were times when I would have told Micah those words, when I would have tried to convince him that the violent way of the hard-boiled detective was a sin and the path of iniquity. In the past I would have tried to instruct him. But I had learned to keep my options open as to the way of righteousness. Me and Micah had more to talk about that way, gliding between the ruins of old houses, burning in the sun.

By that point my dad was reading paperbacks more than the Bible, and when he did read the Scriptures he would walk over to the graveyard, looking sick. He walked around the tombstones.

I have often wondered if that was how he was when the man found him. Hearing the car door slam, he would look up from the graves. The old man could have caught him in the middle of his strange habit, his hobby of looking down at the dead. He used to sneak out at night, like a teenager, to walk an endless circle around the gravestones.

I do know what the man called out, because my father told me.

“The Reverend,” he said. “You are the Reverend?”

My father nodded.

“Reverend,” the old man said. “I have something to speak with you about.”

My father was surprised. No one had called him Reverend for a long time.

 

* * * * * * * * * * *

 

My mother was the first of a wave of funerals. She died in peaceful times, of a pulmonary embolism. Her funeral was very quiet, thinly attended, but there were all the trappings: the coffin and the processional and relatives from the city. People kept me inside, but I could look through the windows and see it in the churchyard, the lowering of the casket. The old preacher, out of retirement, said the words.

My father hadn’t said anything for four days. He hadn’t preached or ministered to anyone. He sat in his room and drove nails into the wall. I could hear him hammering all the time, and I thought he was hanging something. But when I finally snuck in to see, there was just light coming in from the window and a hundred nails or more, driven in all the way.

He didn’t hang anything, but he removed what was there. He took all the pictures of her off of the walls. There was never any more of my mother to see in our house.

The other funerals, when things got bad – before the Walkers established cooperation and the distribution system, before we got the deer hunting organized, before we figured out our new way of life – were a slow downhill. The ceremonies grew terribly sparse. By the end my father was just lowering bodies into the earth and saying a few choice words. And the words themselves were from wavering parts of the Scriptures, lines my father would never had used before.

“O Lord God of my salvation,” he said, over the body of a woman who had killed herself after the rising water rotted her house and left her homeless. She weighed herself down with stones and walked into the new flood plain. The funeral party was her husband and a grown son. They looked blankly at the newly dug earth. I tried not to watch them, out of respect.

“I have cried day and night before thee. Let my prayer come before thee; incline thine ear unto my cry, for my soul is full of troubles, and my life draweth nigh unto the grave.”

The father and son looked at him and blinked. I put a flower on the grave. People stopped coming to my father to perform any more funerals.

The Whole Town Underwater, Part 2

What I remember of my mother is a trail of white, a person speeding down the road on a red bicycle, a smell of chamomile, two brown eyes blinking in surprise, and a body lying in the kitchen, with my father leaning over and saying absolutely nothing. He just nodded his head over and over, like a person bobbing in the water, like a doll nodding in idiotic agreement.

 

When people stopped coming to church my father stopped cleaning it, stopped replacing the candles, just closed it up for a while. He kept the chapel padlocked. But the back, the Sunday School building, he used for his new personal project.

At first his intentions were mysterious. He took some of his books from the library and transferred them to the back of the church in two big boxes, piled full. I thought he was just doing it to make room for his new law and business books, and putting the old ones in storage. The books were all hardbacks, a couple of those mail-order Library Series volumes: the European Reader, American History Through Novels. They had handsome, leatherbound covers. I saw him carry them out in the after-dinner twilight. A stiff breeze was blowing, making the chapel lock clatter. The boxes made strange, hard noises, like there were irregular objects shifting inside.

He started going out to the church in the evenings. He had a lamp he used, that I could see through the side window.

My father became famous for asking after pens. Ballpoints were in short supply, so he would go door to door, asking for pens. He hated asking for things, so I knew that whatever he was doing in the back room involved a lot of writing. He must have been desperate.

People began to notice and talk.

“What’re all the pens for, the pens your Pop’s asking about?” Burt Gibbon asked me during a trip to the library. He wasn’t much of a librarian, but he kept the shelves in decent order because not many people took anything out. He sat at the desk and got slowly drunk off of the beer that Frank Edwards bartered, in exchange for occasional home repairs. By four o’clock most afternoons Burt had nodded off, though he would perk up when the bell jingled and someone opened up the door to let in some fresh air. Some of the books just sat around in boxes in the summer heat, because no one had ever bothered to re-shelve them.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “It’s a mystery. You could ask Micah about it, that’s his territory.”

“Well, if you don’t know, no one knows,” he said. “Family secrets.”

He winked at me, and I blushed, although I didn’t really know what he was getting at. I often worried that the rest of the town thought of my father and me as weird people, now that my father had taken off the mantle of holiness.

I’m sure Burt Gibbon asked everyone questions about my father. Everyone probably whispered about us, since there wasn’t much else for anyone to talk about. But nobody ever treated me with disrespect. As I biked home from my canoe trips with Micah, I sometimes saw people sitting in front of the Marshall Store – the distribution center – and they would wave at me and inquire after my health and well-being.

I’m not sure if this was because they were worried about me, living in a house with my father, or if they didn’t even connect me with him anymore, and they just felt like waving to someone they saw on the street.

I would stop sometimes at the Store, go through the screen door and into the main room, which was cluttered with boxes of produce. Downstairs was the cellar with the dry goods. Mrs. Marshall was always behind the counter, writing letters that she gave to Artie Woodruff for his weekly two-day bicycle run to the nearest working post office.

“Go ahead and take some milk,” she told me, looking up from her letter. “We’ve got plenty for this week.”

This was obviously not true. Most of us weren’t getting anything close to a balanced diet, and I knew that Mrs. Marshall wasn’t giving me easy charity. My father never came into town on any sort of business other than borrowing pens, and so I was the obvious face of this strange, shut-in family living by the old church. People were worried about me, living with such a father. What if he had really gone crazy? What would happen to me, out in that house with him, if he were to drift further into his strange world?

 

When I came home from the boat that afternoon, my father had the old man sitting at our kitchen table. All of my books were stacked on the floor, and at first that was all I could look at. We had an unspoken rule in our house that no one touched anybody else’s books.

“This is Mr. Aptowicz,” my father told me. “He’s a visitor.”

“It is nice to meet you,” Mr. Aptowicz said to me. “You are a very nice boy. Your father says.”

“You’re very polite,” my father said, pouring some water. “Something to drink?”

“Please, thank you,” said Mr. Aptowicz.

There was a big white jar on the table. Usually I don’t say much around people unless I’m asked a direct question, but it was so strange, so thick and white in the middle of the kitchen. Mr. Aptowicz was tan and wrinkled; his face looked like weathered bark. He seemed to bend toward the clean white of the jar, as if it were a pure and holy object.

“What’s the jar about?” I asked, feeling stupid and poorly-spoken.

“That is my wife,” the old man, Mr. Aptowicz, said.

At first I thought he had said something different. His accent was extremely thick.

My father leaned against the sink and looked up at the ceiling. He started whistling. He wasn’t going to help. He was going to let me figure it out.

“That is the purpose of this visit,” the man said. “This visit is about my wife.”

“We have to make a decision, Will,” my father told me. “But first we need to have dinner.”

We sat down. Venison, kale, some potatoes. It was our typical meal. Mr. Aptowicz seemed more than satisfied, shoveling everything down his throat and turning shy eyes to me and my father in turn, as if he felt guilty for receiving our hospitality. All through dinner he snuck glances at the urn. My father offered him more food, but he refused.

“Your kindness is too much,” he said.

My father leaned back in his chair. He looked at the man in a way that suggested he was looking deeper than I did, past his stained khaki jacket, his brown skin, bulbous nose, the way he stooped in his chair. My father always gave the impression of looking at someone more than just bodily.

“It’s really a small kindness,” he said. His tone was measured, the way he used to give sermons, considering the weight of every word. “The kind of kindness anyone should give.”

 

* * * * * * *

I can still remember the way my father read the Gospel of John. I will probably always remember it.

“Here it is,” he would tell me, as he read it to me, in bed before going to sleep, or even in the middle of the day, at the kitchen table, looking out over the seemingly blank expanse of fields beyond the graveyard. In church, that message was in his face: this is the whole of it, the best it can be written.

“In the Beginning was the Word, and Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Even to the dwindling congregation, the message still lingered in the words he spoke. It rang out among the recycled candles, in the steadily darkening, dusky chapel, its benches soiled and torn, the sound of his voice echoing in the mostly empty space, over the bowed heads of the few people who still had a fragile trust in the Lord.

* * * * * * * * *

He walked around at night, in the days after my mother died. Insomnia hit me hard. I barely slept for what seemed like weeks. I knew the sickness had been in my mother’s chest and had hit her all of a sudden, and when I breathed I imagined it catching in my throat – choking was how I imagined it – as my life was taken away from me.

The sound of the creaking back door sent me to the window, where I saw him do strange things. He went from grave to grave and poked each one with a stick he plucked from under the old sycamore near my window. He called the dead by name.

“Travis, you’re sleeping,” he told one. “Mr. Morrison, you won’t wake up for a long, long time. I’m sorry to tell you this. Keep on sleeping, keep on waiting.”

He sat down in the space between gravestones and put his head in his hands.

“Mr. Morrison keeps on waiting,” he said, coming up for air. “Waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting.”

Another time he ransacked the church for candles and stalked around, sticking them in the dirt of the graves. One by one he got them lit, tiny lights all over the cemetery. It was a night of almost no moon, and I can tell you I have never been more afraid in my life than I was to see all those flames blooming up over buried bodies. I can’t begin to think what people thought, driving by, seeing little flames licking up out of the ground. They must have thought we were sliding down into crazy behavior. And they didn’t have to listen to my father, reading aloud to the dearly departed, in a low voice that kept on cracking:

“And now my soul is poured out within me; days of affliction have taken hold of me. In the night season my bones are pierced in me, and the pains that gnaw me take no rest.”

There was no wind to speak of that night, but in one or another way the candles went out, eventually. I found my father asleep on the grass in the morning, facing a tombstone, as if trying to read the name in his sleep.

* * * * * * *

After we had dinner and did the dishes, my father led Mr. Aptowicz up into our spare room. The bed wasn’t made, but my dad did a hurried job getting it ready while Mr. Aptowicz looked around the bare room. He seemed confused.

“You’ll sleep here,” my father said.

“My car,” said Mr. Aptowicz, pointing past the wall and out into the street.

“We’ll watch your car,” my father said.

“I am used to it,” the man said, shaking his head.

He made the sleeping motion with his hands, making them like a pillow. It occurred to me that he must have gotten in the habit of sleeping while parked.

“Do what you like,” my father said. “My son and I are going to go for a walk. Please make yourself at home. Eat what you want, drink what you want. We’ll be back late.”

Mr. Aptowicz seemed to understand. He sat down on the bed and tested the springs, nodding. He kept looking around the room, and then staring at his hands. He was small and wizened, tanned and skinny. His skin looked stretched around his cheekbones. My father turned to me.

“Are you ready?”

And though I didn’t quite know what he meant, I nodded. We went down the stairs together.

We set out down Main Street at a fast clip, so that I had to rush a little to keep up. He slowed down at the bend of Bacon Street, as if making up his mind about the route, and he only picked up speed a little as we moved beyond a row of abandoned houses. I didn’t like to walk this way at night, especially when there wasn’t much of a moon. There were people who lived on Bacon Street who were nasty, who used their guns freely, out of season. My father didn’t look like the issue of fear was heavy on his mind as he walked, eyes trained on the road ahead, looking up once or twice at the cloudless sky.

“Look up at those stars,” my father said, soft and murmuring. Usually he would lecture me about them, giving a story from his past. Now he just let them hang, as if they explained themselves.

We passed the Wood House, the abandoned shell of Pat’s Corner Store, and then around another bend, past Micah’s house, where there were a few lights on. Micah’s father was probably still out at the Walkers’, cleaning up after the milking, but Micah must have been at his desk, reading, with the outside just the reflection of the lamp on the glass.

Suddenly the flood plain spread out before us, wide and seemingly unending. We stopped and considered it. My eyes were adjusting to the darkness, and I could suddenly see how the water was broken, here and there, by black shapes I knew were those old houses still half-standing, like remnants of a lost civilization. My father sat down on the side of the road.

“Let me tell you what that old man, Mr. Aptowicz, said to me.”

I nodded. The weather was still cold enough to make me shiver. I crossed my arms in front of my chest in a defensive gesture.

“That urn is his wife’s ashes. He’s been carrying them for some time. I can’t quite get how long, but it’s been a long time. Maybe years.”

Years didn’t seem so long, looking out at the flood plain. You could tell years were buried out there, underwater.

“He wants a place to bury her.” My father shook his head. “More than that. He wants a place to bury here where he can look after her grave. He wants the grave, and he wants a place along with it.”

He put his head on his knees.

“What do you think about leaving town?” he asked me.

I started a little.

“What?”

My father shook his hand, dismissing the question.

“Hold on, let me tell you the whole thing. The point is, this man is offering us a substantial sum of money, for the house. And the church, I think, although I can’t quite get that out of him. But he definitely wants the house.” He paused and put both his hands out, as if feeling for something in front of him.

“He has cash,” he said. “Lots of it. More than anyone’s seen in a long time. And he’ll give it to us, if we leave, if we leave the place to him.”

“Can’t he just stay with us?” I asked. “He could stay in that room. We could help him, with whatever he needs.”

My father knitted his hands together.

“Finn,” he said, softly. “I want to go. I want to leave this town for good.”

He looked straight ahead at the flood plain. He was addressing it, as much as me.

“But what about your shrine?” I asked him.

My father turned to me, fast, and looked me sharply in the eye.

“What are you talking about?” he asked me.

“What about what you keep in the back room of the church?

We sat for a while, considering each other. It was the first time I had ever said a word about it, though he must have known I would have found out. It made us both incapable of speaking for a long while.

 

I don’t know how long we sat there, watching the subtle motion of the water, but eventually my father turned to me.

“What do you want to do?” he asked me.

It was the first time he had asked that kind of question, and I considered it for a minute.

“I want to keep walking,” I said.

“Fair enough,” he said, getting to his feet.

So we walked, with me leading, past the strange bulk of the Copeland House, further on down the road. Houses dropped away, replaced by stands of black trees. We dipped in and out of different levels of shadow, in and out of overhanging branches. It was so black in patches that we could only follow the white line of the road, faded in places, broken by sprouting weeds and dirt. I went first, with my father behind. The fields were almost more frightening than the trees, spreading out for miles with patches of scrub like gangs of people meeting in the dark.

Once we reached the far end of Bacon Street, I led him down a small path that curved off of the main road and through the woods, towards the new dugout where Micah and I always set off in our canoe. We stepped into the boat, and I took my father out onto the water in the darkness. I did my best at navigating between the houses. The water cut wounds into the land, and I ferried us along the breaches.

“People used to live under there,” my father told me. “But I guess you know that.”

“I do,” I said. “We go around here a lot, Micah and I.”

“Your friend,” my father said, recognizing.

I nodded. The little sliver of moon was easy to see over the black curtain of water.

“I knew them, I guess,” my father said. “I didn’t know them as well as I should have. I didn’t do the job I was supposed to.”

His voice trembled a little, as my paddle pulled us across the surface of the water.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think anyone could have done it. I think we were doomed from the start.”

He didn’t say anything in response, just looked out over the bay. The wind came up and died down, breathing.

My paddle struck the top of the old Marina, and I tied us off. We stared a while, out at the submerged world. On still nights, and the nights were almost always close to silent in those days, it was hard to look out on the water and not be struck by the possibility of other worlds. People could always rise out of the sea, or the waters could recede. Or else the people could be swimming under the surface of the water, from house to house, speaking to each other in the lowest of tones, so as to avoid waking the dreamers who wandered on the surface. It was the same as when I caught a glimpse of the cemetery in the moonlight, when I imagined a whole country spreading underground, deaf to the sounds of our everyday, puttering lives. There were more of them than us, in the end.

We shivered in the little boat, with the cool wind blowing off of the bay, bringing the smell of salt.

“Take us back,” my father said, quietly. “Let’s go home.”

The Whole Town Underwater, Part 3

The day my father buried the remains of Mr. Aptowicz’s wife, people came out to our house to see the ceremony. I don’t know how they found out. I suppose Mr. Aptowicz must have made his intentions clear somehow. People arrived on bikes and on foot. They said hello to Mr. Aptowicz, who had become a local celebrity, but they seemed guilty in the presence of my father. Lapsed churchgoers were discovered.

My father went between the people, patting them on the back, as friendly as I’d ever seen him. His eyes showed heavy wrinkles around his smile.

“Welcome, welcome,” he said. “Nice to see you. Billy, Helen, nice to see you. Welcome everyone.”

I wondered if he would put his vestments on, but I was disappointed and a little relieved to see him in khakis and a blue shirt, matching the open sky above him.

We all helped dig a grave, puffing under the spring sun. It didn’t need to be large, we knew, but we wanted to make it look like a real funeral, and not something placed unceremoniously in the ground.

When we were finished Mr Aptowicz came forward shyly, his face bowed, and fell on his knees. He reached down into the grave and placed the white urn in the dirt. A sigh went through the crowd and a breeze started up, cooling everyone.

My father stood at the head of the grave and paused. He made his hands into fists and placed them on his lips, thinking.

“I thought I would read from the Scriptures today,” he told the gathered people. “But somehow I couldn’t find the right sort of passage. I know stories that fit, and things that could be said, but when I tried them out last night, listening to the words, they seemed to come out wrong, half-hearted. And I know this occasion calls for something, something correct.”

He paused again and took a deep breath. My father had gotten thin in those lean years; we had all gotten thin. His hair was falling out. He looked like he could sleep for years, that he needed to, for his own good.

“Mr Aptowicz came here a stranger,” he continued. “He will not leave here a stranger. We have given him a place to bury his dead.”

People murmured their agreement. I looked at Mr. Aptowicz, who probably didn’t understand. For the whole last two days he had sat in our living room, lost in his own thoughts. He put his white urn on the living room table and watched it.  When I eyed it, curious, he pointed at the urn and nodded.  I picked it up; it was strangely heavy, like his wife had been a tiny woman who they had placed bodily inside.

My father looked at the grave opening up beneath him.

“I wondered to myself, last night, trying to find words to say today. I thought: who has seen the dead buried? We have seen them in ones and twos, but we can never imagine the whole host, spread out before our eyes, all at once. The names call, the bodies are buried below our feet. What can anyone say about that? How could anyone deny one more, among their midst?”

I looked out over the crowd. They were staring at my father in confused sadness. He was going somewhere they didn’t want to follow. But they stood and listened.

“We will inter this body in the earth, where it belongs,” my father said. “There are no words for the process. But we are gathered to engage in this simple ceremony, and we need words as surely as we need spades to move the earth. So I will say this, to all of you. We do this in an effort to understand, in one glimpse, the speech of a whole host of people who are now invisible. During this burial, we listen to one voice, the departed voice, and no more. We cannot have it otherwise. We cannot listen to anything more, because we do not want to bury ourselves. Because we want to be alive.”

Everyone took a single breath, like a movement of wind, a wave through the people.

“And though I don’t know if it fits, or merits saying, I will tell you that these are the last words I will ever say over this cemetery,” my father told us. “I am going away from this place, and I don’t think I will ever return. I leave the church to the congregation. You are all good people, and you can decide your own relationship with God.”

My father went over to the doors of the church and, taking out his key, undid the padlock. Then he walked back to Mr. Aptowicz, shook his hand, and went inside. The sound of the door slamming echoed in the sudden silence.

Everyone stood around and waited to see if anything would happen. When nothing did, Burt Gibbons lumbered up to the side of the grave, picked up a shovel, and started moving the dirt. After a while I did too. We worked at it until the dirt was packed in. I was sweating; the sun was high in the sky.

When I looked up from digging, there were only a few people left. They looked at the church but they didn’t go up to it. They began to filter off, in twos and threes, until it was just me, leaning against the sycamore, looking at the grave. Murmuring thanks to no one in particular, Mr. Aptowicz went to his car, got in, and sat there for a long time.

 

That night, while my father was sleeping, I went out into the night air and walked around the cemetery, trying to get the nerve up. The stones were quiet. The trees moved a little. I walked around the graves in circles, looking up at the windows where the two old men were sleeping, until I felt ready.

I opened the back door of the church. I knew where the key was kept, in a hole in the brick, left of the door. I had been in there once or twice already. I knew how to get in.

Once I was inside I turned on the little lamp, and all at once the room appeared. The light reflected off of the spines of the Great Library Series volumes, off of the windows, but mostly off of the pictures that lined the walls and even the floor. The only bare space free of glass was a little path that led to the center of the room, to a large table with a book open in the center. They took the light like mirrors, framing secondary lights that made the room seem twice as large as it actually was. The pictures themselves were obscure, hidden in the glare, so that I had to look closer to really see them.

They were all pictures of my mother. Alone, with me, with me and my father. Reading, laughing, lying on the couch. Pictures of her in church, pictures of her walking down a long road with leaves falling, and cars on either side, moving away. You couldn’t escape here face, anywhere you looked.

I walked to the center, past college photos, photos of bathtubs, washing me, cloudy days with no rain, childhood pictures of someone who must have been my mother, someone I had never seen. I picked my way through that cluster of mute faces.

I opened the book. I wasn’t surprised, I had seen it before, but I saw there was fresh ink on the pages. He had never stopped writing. My father had treated the pages of those books, those old American Library Collections, to look like new paper, and had written over them in whatever ink he could find: here blue, here red, and then bold black in some places. In some places you could see the old type, faintly, beneath his script. Palimpsests. Sometimes his hand seemed shaky, from rushing to get the words out, or from some emotion that set his hand trembling.

There were titles I knew well. Headings from the Scriptures, from Acts and Ruth and even the Epistles. I took other books off of the shelves and held them open to the light. The words were hard to read, but everywhere I could see my mother’s name, Molly, in the middle of sentences where she had never appeared before.

And David comforted Molly his wife, and went in unto her, and lay with her.

And it came to pass that after this, that Absalom the son of David had a fair sister, whose name was Molly.

This is what he was doing, or was done with. He had rewritten everything to contain my mother. She held me on the mountain and held a knife over me. My mother wandered in the desert. She was born and died a thousand times. The Lord never spoke to anyone but her, and she spoke sermons that no one else could ever have delivered, to the poor and the disfigured, speaking out of the darkness to those who were in sorrow. She wrote proverbs and psalms, and was the author and the subject of love songs. She cursed God, and spoke from the whirlwind. She came to redeem, and was taken away, leaving all of us to wait for the glorious day of her return.

As I read, I started to feel something creeping in the air, a presence forming in the dark corners. The reflected light, the mirroring frames, the air off the turning pages like slowly taken breath – hushed and haunted sights and sounds – they were all awaiting the visitation they had been built to contain.

I put the books back with shaky hands. I put everything back where I had found it, retreated, and locked it away.

 

The next day I walked my father to the car. Clouds had rolled in overnight, and it seemed like at any second the sky would open up. But it held off just long enough.

“Where are you going?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll drive until I have to stop, and then I’ll make a decision.”

I nodded.

“You’re staying?” he asked. It was only half a question.

I nodded again. He looked past me, up into the second floor window. Mr. Aptowicz was lying in bed, as he had all morning and into the early afternoon. He wouldn’t speak. He refused food and water. He lay with his hands folded over him and looked up at the ceiling.

“You’ll take care of him?” he asked me.

“Of course,” I said. “As best I can.”

“It might not take long,” he said, turning back to me. “People follow each other, sometimes.”

The words hung in the air.

“What will you do?” he asked me.

“I’m going to wait until he passes,” I said. “And then I’m going to find a place in town.”

“And here?” my father asked.

“I’m going to burn everything.” I set my mouth. “I’m going to burn it all.”

My father leaned back against the car. He was wearing sunglasses; I couldn’t see his eyes. But he was facing the church, and I think he was looking towards the back annex.

“Oh,” he said. “Yes, yes.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m going to leave the dead with the dead.”

“No,” he said. “That’s not it.” He clasped his hands. “I don’t know what it is.”

I tried to hold him, but he was limp in my hands. He leaned against the car and for a minute I wondered if he was ever going to move again. But he did. The wind stirred up and he stiffened, pushed away from me. He looked down the road the way you look at the sky when someone near you is crying.

“I’m going,” he said. “I’m going now.”

“Yeah,” I said. I stepped back onto the grass.

He took the old man’s car and went off down the road. I sat on the lawn like a child, plucking at dandelions, as I watched my father departing.

Stories of a Ghost Town

 

On the night before my grandfather’s funeral, I woke to the sound of my younger brother screaming. It wasn’t the first time I had heard him do this – scream during a nightmare – but it was a shock, regardless. I shot up in bed and tried to get an arm around his shoulders to comfort him. Instead, he ended up standing by the near wall of the motel room and pointing his finger at the air above my side of the bed, all the while shouting nonsense words. My brother is a sleepwalker as well as a screamer, so I didn’t think too much of this. Mostly I just wanted him to shut up so I could go back to sleep.

My older brother, who by virtue of age always gets the best sleeping accommodations, was lying by himself in the other queen-sized bed at the far end of the room. When my younger brother started screaming, my older brother, taking control of the situation as the eldest is supposed to, tried his best to get us to calm down. I could see his eyes scanning the room, trying to get a handle on the situation.

It was only when my older brother started shaking and pointing at the ceiling near my head that I started to get a little nervous. “They’re playing a trick on me,” I thought. “They planned a prank while I was asleep.” I reached over and turned on the light.

My younger brother was still standing at the near wall, next to the door to the hallway, breathing heavily. He was awake. The cheap print of flowers you always find in budget motel rooms was right next to his head. My older brother was on the other side of the room, still in bed, but he, too, was breathing heavily, obviously shaken up. Without his glasses or contacts he was squinting all over the place.

“What the fuck?” I asked them. “What the fuck is going on?”

“Oh my god,” my little brother told me. “I just saw something hanging over the bed.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“There was some black shape, just hanging over your head, right there,” he said, still pointing at the ceiling above me.

“I’m too old for this shit, Hank,” I told him. “Stop fucking with me.”

“No, I saw it too,” my older brother said. “There was something there, and when Hank started screaming it flew and disappeared” – he made a smacking motion with his hand – “right into the wall.”

“You two are fucking with me,” I told them. “And I’m not gonna let you freak me out.”

“I’m fucking serious, dude,” Hank said, getting slowly back into bed. “There was something there.”

“He’s right, Sam,” my older brother said. “There was something there.”

“Whatever,” I said, my heart hammering. “Stop freaking me out.”

I reached over and turned the light back off. The shadows covering the room came back instantly. The cheap print of flowers took on a sinister blankness, where the heads of the roses could have been anything red and round.

“There’s no way I’m gonna get to sleep now,” Hank said, pulling the comforter over his head.

“Me neither,” my older brother told me.

Liars, I thought to myself, and sure enough they were both asleep within twenty minutes, with my younger brother snoring in a cartoon hacksaw fashion and my older brother breathing peacefully. My younger brother is a much bigger man than I am, and when he has screaming nightmares he sometimes flails his arms around violently, so as I lay in bed, trying to trick myself into sleeping, I wasn’t sure whether I was more afraid of the inky shape my brothers had seen hanging over me or the possibility of being accidentally hit by Hank’s terrified, flailing arms. I kept my eyes trained on the ceiling, while still trying to reassure myself that the whole thing was a prank, cooked up by my brothers, and that the best thing to do was not to let on how scared I was and just fall back to sleep. Tomorrow would be an early day. Eventually exhaustion won me over, and I drifted off.

 

The next morning, while we all bustled around the suite getting ready for the service, tying ties and making ourselves look presentable, we told my father and stepmother about the whole episode.

“They say they saw something hanging over my side of the bed,” I said, trying to make it seem like a ridiculous idea. “Some black shape.”

“We did!” my little brother said, his voice a little bit strained, trying hard to convince the skeptics. As the youngest, he’s learned to insist on his share and his say, over the years.

My older brother, Jack, gave his shy support. “I saw it, too,” he said, trying to get a good dimple in his tie.

So we had my younger brother, with his passionate argument, angry at our collective disbelief, and my older brother, with the cool, tentative support of someone who believes and thus has to agree, although he would really rather that the whole thing was just left alone. I was being worked at from both sides, between spirit and reason.

“This is just ridiculous,” I said, trying to make a show out of laying out my pants, as if the whole conversation was beneath me. “There wasn’t anything there.”

My father was a little distant that morning, sleepy and grieving. He puttered around the carpet, skipped out for donuts. He wasn’t all that interested in paranormal occurrences. His father had just died, and he was going to give remarks at the funeral.

This left my stepmother to hang out with us, joke with us, coax us out of bed. She was in good form that morning, keeping things light. She seemed interested in the ghost discussion. Though she’s a pretty practical woman, she’s not above a little spark in the eyes when these sorts of arguments come up.

“This is funny,” my stepmother said, laughing. “Here’s Hank saying, ‘it’s a ghost’, and Sam’s the one who says it’s ridiculous. That’s hard to believe.”

My stepmother’s mind is sharp. She seems to remember anything. During parties, in casual conversation, she has the gift of remembering every anecdote ever told about the people present, of pulling them up in a split second. When I was younger it used to embarrass the shit out of me. I like to think that the past is the past, that the person I am now is the firm and total outcome of a long and painful transformation that will never be mentioned again. But people like my stepmother remember the boy who used to shriek during the previews of horror movies, and they can cut you down to size. It took me a long time to understand the value in this. But in the motel room, with all of us shoved together as a family, these comments help reinforce the sense that we’re a self-contained unit that understands each other’s secrets.

Sometimes it seems to me that a family is held together by three things. One is love, obviously, and a certain assumed tenderness. We gave each other shoulder squeezes during the funeral, we held each other at the reception. The second is a willing embarrassment, where everybody knows that they have the power, at any time, to reduce any other member of the family to a red-faced, muttering wreck. As if to say, remember where you came from. Stay honest.

And the third, I think, is shared fear.

 

Nowadays it’s rare, obviously, for me and my younger brother to share a bed, but there was a time when we did it every night. Though it’s hazy in my memory, I think the period when we slept in the same bed lasted a couple of years, when I was seven or eight and my brother was three or four. It wasn’t out of any necessity; my parents are and were upper-middle class, borderline rich, and we lived in a farmhouse that had plenty of rooms. But my little brother had decided that he didn’t like the nursery where he had grown up and that he wanted to move in with me, and I, for my part, liked the company.

There were a couple of reasons why I liked the company. My brother has always been talkative and forward about conversation, drawing people out, and in those days I was going through a quiet, brooding time and needed someone to make me talk. Before going to sleep, he would egg me on with question after question, the kinds younger brothers ask older brothers.

“What’s that weird sound outside?”

“Frogs.”

“Do you think Mom is going to buy a new TV?”

“Maybe.”

“I think Mr. Loatman from down the street is nice. Do you think he’s nice?”

“Yes.”

I would pretend to be annoyed at having to answer all these questions, but secretly I don’t know what I would have done without them. Those were fairly unhappy years, and sometimes I went whole days without talking to anyone. At school I was invisible to everyone except the teachers. When I did talk I said wildly inappropriate things, things I had no reason to say. One day I told my classmates I could heal people with my hands. Some of them laughed at me and made fun of me for it. Most of them just ignored me. Melissa, probably my only friend at the time, took me aside one afternoon and tried to explain it to me.

“Why do you say things like that?” she asked, “Weird things. That’s why people don’t like you.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Whatever.”

“You can’t heal anybody with your hands,” she told me, with a teacher’s matter-of-fact tone.

“You don’t know that,” I said, scratching at the dirt with a stick.

“Okay,” she said, nodding. “But you should stop saying all those weird things if you ever want people to think you’re normal.”

I took her advice, and so I went for long periods of time without talking to anyone. My inner, invented world would start to take over; riding the bus home from school, I looked at the rushing branches and invented kingdoms in the woods, hidden behind stands of trees. No one talked to me to break me out of my reverie. The kingdoms stretched through the forest, growing larger and more intricate, pressing at the edges of the known world. Other kids were shouting, slapping each other, trading tapes and baseball cards. Finally, the bus dropped me off at the edge of my driveway, and I stood there for a while, watching the cattails waving in the wind. There wasn’t another house for a half-mile in either direction.

So it was good for me, I think, to have to answer my little brother’s questions. Though he was four years younger than me, he was infinitely more engaged with the world. He wanted to know everything, and although I was clearly the wrong person to ask, he assumed I had an authority to answer. Knowing this, I could give my best shot without being nervous.

“Does anyone in your grade play Little League?” he asked me.

“Some people,” I said, thinking hard. I didn’t pay much attention to sports, or any of my classmates’ extracurricular activities. “The older ones.”

“I can’t wait to play tee ball,” he said.

“Uh huh.”

“It’s not real baseball, though.”

“Really?”

“No. You have to have pitches for baseball.”

“True.”

Sometimes I didn’t even answer, just let him talk for a while. It was nice to be able to hear someone talk without worrying about how to answer, what to say. And there was a part of me that wanted his company for more than just talking. I also wanted my brother’s company because he was fearless, and I was terrified.

“Are you okay?” he’d ask.

I was staring at my closet, at the view of the pond outside of our window. Sometimes you could see water snakes wriggling across the water in the moonlight.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Are you being scared again?”
“Yeah,” I said.

“There’s no such thing as monsters,” he’d say, very seriously.

“I know,” I said.

While in the presence of my brother the world I had brought into being when I was alone held no power over me. He drew me back to reality. Eventually, though, he would go to sleep, and leave me to my ever-growing fantasy life. During those years my parents were separating, our family was shattering, and two dogs ran away. What I remember most clearly is the view from my bedroom window, the feeling of terror I felt when the sun began to set, and the tremendous relief that always swept over me when I saw the sunlight coming in my window in the morning to tell me that I wasn’t dead.

 

The farm we lived on was no place for an eight-year old with a fevered imagination. Many times in the intervening years I’ve gone back to visit, and in the sunlight it’s a beautiful place. You roll down a long driveway, past three huge sycamores. The house stands on the top of a hill that slopes down to an endless plain of marsh on one side and a series of fields on the other. Tall cattails obscure the view from the orchard and the pond, and a large weeping willow guards the gateway to the marsh on the other side. I’ve walked through the peach grove in the sunset, thrown sticks into the old pond. The only sense of strangeness is the everpresent silence in the air. Maybe it’s the fact that I moved to the city a while ago, but the quality of silence around our old farm seems unaccountably eerie to me, like stepping out of the world. It’s as if the land has no interest in you, that you will pass away, given time.

I could handle that. I walked back and forth through the property. The woman who lived there looked at me with a combination of fondness and worry; she could tell the place meant a lot to me, and she wanted me to have time to see it, but she didn’t want me digging up old secrets or tumbling back into the place that she now rightly owned.

She left, the house went up for sale. I drove down once with friends and went out to the farm by night. We rode up the driveway, and as soon as I heard the sounds of the wheels hitting gravel I tensed up, grabbed my seat. One of the friends I was with, a girl who I had developed a giant crush on, patted my back.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“I feel like I’m eight years old again.”

“I know what you mean,” she said, laughing.

When we got out of the car we pitched a tent in the peach orchard. They wanted to explore, but I couldn’t get beyond the first few steps of the trail that led through the fields. The night was practically pitch-black; there was almost no moon. I was literally paralyzed by fear.

“God,” one of my friends said. “This is really getting to you, isn’t it?”

I nodded. The sky opened up, and rain came pouring down. We rushed into the tent and I was saved from any further shame.

“What’s so scary here?” the girl I was interested in asked me, as we were lying in our sleeping bags.

“Oh, nothing real,” I told her.

“Well, tell me anyway,” she said.

She was lying next to me, inches away, and I was still young enough that this was a rare experience. The rain on the tent made it hard to hear, so I leaned in towards her.

“Are you sure you want to know?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said, laughing. It was a husky laugh, low and cynical. It made me want to tell her everything.

“I slept in a room overlooking the marsh,” I told her. “So when I was in bed I could look out over the whole long stretch.” I made a motion with my hands, letting my flat palm ride outward to show how long the marsh was. “When I was young I didn’t have a good grasp on reality. I was alone a lot of the time and I got to making up everything I saw, until I didn’t really know when to stop.”

“Kids do that,” she said.

“I guess they do,” I said. “But maybe not as much as I did. When I looked out over the marsh, all I could think about were things coming out of it, marching up the hill, towards the house.”

“Things?” she asked. Her voice sounded thin.

“Yeah, weird things. Monsters. Things that hopped on one leg, half scales, things with long fangs, things that tunneled up the hill so that all you saw was a trail of dirt, until they got right under my window and decided to show their face…”

“Stop,” she said. “Now you’re freaking me out.”

We paused for a second. I was scaring myself, too. The creatures were starting to take root in my mind.

“You thought about that?” she asked me.

“Pretty much every night.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That sounds terrible.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. We must have said something more, but I can’t remember what it was. Somehow or another I had weirded the conversation. She rolled over and went to sleep, and I was left wondering if maybe I should have kept the whole thing to myself. I spent the rest of the night listening to the rain and reminding myself that I was eighteen years old and shouldn’t be scared of the dark, for the sake of the normal person I wanted to become.

 

I can’t remember the precise time that my brother started sleepwalking. He always muttered in his sleep, and I remember how friends of mine used to tickle his fingers and face with feathers to hear the strange things he would say. Even when we were kids, sharing a bed, I would sometimes hear little sentences – nonsense, mostly – as I laid awake trying to convince myself that falling asleep wouldn’t mean certain doom. But he never left the bed, or screamed. He was an absolutely peaceful sleeper, as far as I remember.

I stopped being afraid of the dark – for the most part – when my family left the South Jersey countryside for Philadelphia. I was twelve at the time, and along with all the obvious benefits a move to the city had for a quiet, nerdy kid, there was the fact that it never went totally dead at night. Even if I woke up at two in the morning I could still listen to the soothing sounds of traffic passing underneath my window. For whatever reason, this constant reminder of the physical world convinced me, once and for all, that no human or monster was going to murder me while I slept.

It was in this downtown apartment that I first remember my younger brother sleepwalking. He had the room next to mine. It had big windows that looked out on a skyscraper that was always lit by a rotating message board. “BUY GIRL SCOUT COOKIES”, it said, and “SIXERS TIX NOW ON SALE FOR 2002 SEASON”. My room was between him and the bathroom, and he would sometimes walk through it during the day to avoid going out into the hallway.

One night I woke up to find my brother standing in the doorway. His eyes were sleepy and hooded, and he was swaying a little bit. Occasionally he made big smacking sounds with his mouth.

“Are you okay, Hank?” I asked.

“Just wait okay I’m… just hold on gotta find… hold on,” he said.

“Hank?” I asked.

My brother walked into the room and started opening and closing my drawers. It was loud, and it made me nervous.

“Hey,” I said. “Hey.”

“Just hold on and Ida what yousay un uh oops.” he said, closing the drawers again. He scratched his head and looked agitated. “What huh shoo OH OH MAN!”

His voice rising scared me a little. I didn’t really know what to do, so I just sat there in the bed and watched. Eventually he shuffled back to bed, leaving the door open behind him.

 

“Hank was sleepwalking,” I told my stepmother the next morning. She was sitting in our basement kitchen, drinking coffee. “It was weird.”

“Happens sometimes,” she said.

I waited for her to say something else, but she just kept drinking her coffee. In hindsight, I can understand that she just wanted me to leave her alone. With my dad at work, we were forced to spend a lot of time together. The natural thing would have been to give each other space, but at that age all I wanted to do was talk, all the time, for any reason.

“He walked into my room and just STOOD there,” I said, my adolescent voice getting nervous and shrill. “It was so WEIRD!”

“Make yourself a pizza in the microwave,” my stepmother said, exasperated. How had she gotten mixed up with this kid? What was he going on about?

“Okay,” I said. I let it go.

 

My brother’s sleepwalking didn’t remain my secret for long. It’s become a part of the family mythology. One night, not long after my stepmother had a baby, she found my brother standing in my half-sister’s nursery, slack-jawed, staring at the crib. My stepmother had heard his muttering over the baby monitor.

For a while the possibility of my brother falling down the stairs became an issue. We lived in a four-story row house, and if he had fallen down the four flights, toppling over the banister, it would have meant serious injury, if not death. My stepmother, who had known my brother long enough that she was, in all senses, his second mother, worried about this quite a lot.

In the end it seemed that my brother, despite having no recollection or seeming control over his night wanderings, had enough submerged sense not to throw himself down the stairwell. My father made sure that the roof door stayed locked, but other than that we didn’t take any special precautions.

My brother and I had a fairly happy time in Philadelphia. I came out of my shell a bit, I joined a few bands, I made some good friends. Hank became a real sports talent, a great pitcher, a more than decent basketball player. We were, by all accounts, turning into well-adjusted kids. I even managed to get into trouble on more than one occasion for drinking in my parents’ house while they were away. My friends egged me on. I had friends! They wanted to egg me on! Life was turning out better than I had expected. I no longer woke up in the morning and felt blessed by the continuation of my life; I had started to take a certain acceptable level of happiness more or less for granted.

 

When I went to college I more or less cut off all contact with my family for months at a time. So I wasn’t around when my brother began to scream and shake in his sleep. I heard about all these things second-hand, from my family, whenever I was home. My brother, his body having swelled while I was gone into an impressive bulk, would be chatting with my stepmother at the kitchen table, his hands wrapped around a glass of orange juice, and she would drop a comment about it.

“You were really yelling last night,” she’d say.

“Was I?” he said, flashing his goofy, winning smile. “I can never remember. What’d I say?”

“I can’t remember,” my stepmother said. “Just nonsense, probably.”

“Weird,” my brother said, wolfing down a donut.

His face, the new one he grew while I was away at college, is open and welcoming, and his voice, having grown lower, booms out in a friendly way. My brother has become the kind of kid who could have a beer with pretty much anyone in the world. His voice is clear and confident, with a jocular ring you hear in some men, the kind of men who can make sly and inoffensive jokes, who can talk at parties, who know how to set people at ease. It’s not the kind of voice you imagine screaming in the night, and my brother doesn’t seem the type to be plagued by nightmares.

 

During college, after spending four years trying to put New Jersey behind me, I found myself obsessing about the place. I started telling people I was from there before even mentioning Philadelphia. Once, at a party, I drunkenly defended a female friend of mine against two guys who had stolen a bottle of liquor, and were threatening her to stop her from ratting on them.

“Don’t fuck around with me,” I said, swaying. “I’m from New Jersey, motherfucker.”

“Who is this guy?” they asked the room. “What’s his problem?”

“There’s no problem,” I said. “Just don’t fuck with someone from Jersey.”

In my college fiction classes, I found myself writing over and over again about places that looked suspiciously like the town where I had grown up; I wrote a story about a kid who falls in love with the daughter of a man who shoots four people in his basement, in a house next to waving cattails. I wrote a lot of thinly-veiled autobiography about brainy, reclusive kids struggling to make connections with other people; a lot of times, these people were girls. And no matter what, the marsh, stretching endless and unknowable, made an appearance.

The majority of these stories ended up being ghost stories, of one kind or another. Characters disappeared, or became entangled in various quasi-supernatural events. People seemed to like them, and I developed a certain pride about them. It seemed like a major possibility that I would be a writer someday, which seemed an endlessly romantic idea to me. Besides, I was in love, with a woman who was a writer, too. I had the thrilling feeling that I was able to tell people things, things I would usually never talk about, in a way that would make them understand. I had the power to make people interested in what was inside my head.

A year went by. I suddenly found myself sick about what it was that I was doing. I felt like I wasn’t progressing. The stories were coming out more and more the same, with the same tropes. People whispered in the night, kids went out on bikes in the darkness and discovered things. And there was always that stupid, uncreative image of the marsh grass waving in the wind. I was becoming lazy. No, worse: I was showing myself to be the worst possible thing, a hack, coasting along. All I had was one good idea and I wasn’t going to be able to milk it forever.

I started having this strange fixation, that someone would find out how I had embellished my childhood, that someone would read the stories and come after me, to punish me for profiting off a place I knew nothing about. I didn’t even remember the real New Jersey all that well. I had transformed it totally into a place in my mind.

I stopped talking about Jersey. I dumped the writer I was seeing and had a series of affairs with girls I thought were hip and glamorous, without any regard for my former girlfriend’s feelings. I left the country for a while, and when I came back I erased all of my old writing. I was convinced this was necessary in order to move on. I was jealous of my friends who wrote more experimental pieces. I began to write snarky, post-modern short stories, full of winking allusions and fashionable, complicated structures.

My advisor was less than excited about it.

“This is actually bad writing,” he told me. “I’m not going to lie to you. This is actually terrible. What are you doing? Why do you suddenly feel the need to change everything?”

“I want to be a different kind of writer,” I said.

“You’d have to be a different kind of person,” he told me.

I switched advisors, and set to work on a novel that I was sure had the greatest premise of all time.

“It’s set in the future,” I told people. “The United States has split into two countries.”

“The main character is working on a biography while trying to get his student across the river to Canada,” I told people. “It’s a book within a book.”

“I’m a quarter of the way in,” I told people.

“I’ve got a lot of it done.”

“It’s going to be long.”

“It’s going to be epic.”

“It might be longer than I expected.”

“It’s coming along.”

By the time the spring came, I had written a hundred and fifty pages. My novel, as far that went, was a failure. I left college certain that I’d lost whatever meager talent I’d had in the first place.

 

After graduation, my father and stepmother invited me to come along with them to Italy for a couple of weeks. I had nothing definite planned, and, figuring I’d never be able to visit Europe on my family’s dime again, I decided to come along.

My younger brother came, along with his girlfriend and my little half-sister. With no one special to spend time with, I spent the idle hours of the day wandering around the towns of the Amalfi Coast, Positano and Priano. Hemingway had spent time there, someone told me, and although I had almost forgotten about Hemingway in my post-modern rush it was something I enjoyed thinking about. I had brought my computer with the excuse that I wanted to work on my unfinished novel, but I didn’t write anything. By then I knew it wasn’t going anywhere. Mostly I just walked from town to town, buying an occasional cup of coffee, and reading. It was a lonely couple of weeks, and even though I understood that I wouldn’t have a chance like it again for a while I found myself missing home, and waiting for the return flight.

My brother was in heaven. He loved the food, he loved the weather, he loved his girlfriend. We stayed in a villa and a posh hotel, and while the luxury embarrassed me he made the smart choice and enjoyed every amenity. He swam in the pool, drank the lemon liquor, and lay in the sun.

In the last hotel we stayed in Hank and I shared a room, which meant sharing a king-sized bed. I had heard stories about his screaming, and I was worried.

“If I do anything, just wake me up,” he told me. “I’ll be okay.”

“Will do,” I said.

Despite the strange fear of a sudden outburst, it was comforting to share a bed with my brother. We argued a lot on the trip – I was frustrated and lonely, and a little condescending – but when we settled down for the night things were peaceful. I kept trying to convince him to go sleep with his girlfriend, but but my brother has always been an honorable kid and he stuck with the rules. Once again, I protested, but secretly I was glad for the company.

Most nights I had a hard time sleeping, and I lay awake and listened to the dim sounds of football matches coming through the walls from other rooms.

 

The night it happened I was having a terrible time trying to sleep. I tried the trick of making my whole body perfectly still, letting my arms and legs go numb, and thinking about the blackest, quietest place I could. Nothing worked. I could dimly hear my brother breathing next to me, so I tried focusing on that, thinking it might help.

As I lay there, listening, my brother’s breath started to quicken. Little gasps began to escape his lips. He started to mutter. He must be having a dream, I thought, as I lay there totally motionless. He must be having a bad dream.

Within a split second the murmurings turned to screams, and my little brother shot up in bed and slammed against the headboard. He put his hands in front of him as if to ward off some phantom that was flying to meet him.

“NO NO NO, STOP, NO NO, STOP, FUCK SHIT SHIT FUCK FUCK,” he yelled.

“Hank, stop!” I shouted. “Calm down, it’s okay, calm down.”

He gripped the headboard and shook it. His whole body was quivering, and he was rocking the bed back and forth. The bulk he had gotten, training for college baseball, was all tensed, gripping onto whatever he could find. I was sure he was going to break the bed.

“STOP, HANK,” I yelled. “SHUT UP!”

“OH SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT,” he finally screamed, and then he woke up.

“Holy shit,” I said, suddenly terrified that my heart was going to stop. “What the hell just happened?”

“There was something there,” Hank said, pointing at the corner of the room. “I just saw something there, there’s something there, look, there’s something there.”

“There’s nothing there, Hank,” I told him. “Look, Hank, there’s nothing there.”

“There was something there,” he told me, softer now, less insistent. “There was a boat, and it was coming to hit me. We were all on a boat, and someone was coming to ram us.”

He paused. We caught out breath.

“I thought we were going to die,” he told me.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Go back to sleep. Let’s go back to sleep. You scared the shit out of me.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought there was something there.”

“Whatever,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”

Sure enough, he was off snoring within minutes, while I laid awake and tried to calm myself down. I stared at the corner of the room. I thought about protecting my brother from invisible enemies. It was a silly idea; my brother has no need of protection, and certainly not from me. But I lay awake and worried about him. Some part of family is shared fear. The fear of parents for their children. The fear of brothers for their sisters’ well being, at the hands of teenage boys. The fear of a brother for his brother in the face of nightmares.

 

I came home from Italy and got myself an apartment in Philadelphia, a city that I love dearly and am fairly certain brought happiness into my life. I got a job that I thought was pretty decent, and I settled down to the business of writing again. I tried to stop self-editing so much, and as I did I found that my old hometown crept back, slowly. I used it as a setting, once in a while. I didn’t feel too bad about it. It was part of my life.

In the weeks after my brother woke me in the middle of the night and told me about the black shape hanging over my head, I wandered around my neighborhood with a strange sense of otherness clinging to me. It was a feeling I remembered from when I first moved to Philadelphia at the age of twelve. I was marked by something that no one else understood. How could everyone be walking around in a state of happiness, in this light, shining place where it never seemed to be totally quiet? Hadn’t they ever been afraid of the silence, for once in their whole lives? I fixated on the idea of a shape hanging over my head. It seemed like a sign of something. Marked for death? Visited by strange wisdom from another word?

The stories I am writing these days are, in one sense or another, ghost stories. I think they always will be. I think the emotion of fear is so deeply ingrained in me that it will never be absent from any story I create. For me, the unknowable in life centers around things that inspire terror. Empty roads, overhanging trees, strange sounds. Places of death, like graveyards. Not that these places are always terrifying. But in order to inspire joy and transcendence, to place themselves outside of mundane reality, they have to have the capacity to inspire fear. When I think of a man flying, or a woman walking across water, I always imagine it happening at night, down a dirt road, on a secluded lake surrounded by trees. They are outlined against the moon. They turn and look at you and you don’t quite know their intentions.

I drove down with my older brother and his girlfriend to my old hometown recently. On the way there my brother pointed out various landmarks.

“That’s the place where I made out with Jackie Dawson in her basement,” he said, smiling.

His girlfriend rolled her eyes. I could tell she thought the stories were cute. They made my brother look like a wild young kid in love with the town, someone who knew its secrets. They were innocent stories.

But when we turned the corner onto the main street of our old town, and parked the car, the glib retelling of stories ended. My brother fished out two little bottles of Jack Daniels and gave me one.

“Tell us a ghost story,” he told me.

“Sure thing,” I said.

We walked down the street and I rattled off a few of the ones I know, about the Wood House and the pirate ghost that haunts the third floor, about the Greenwich Horror that took away three British soldiers during the Revolutionary War. None of them are particularly scary, just odd and haunting. We drank some whiskey and walked to the edge of some empty fields. Someone was running a combine, even at night. We could hear the engine in the distance. Otherwise it was unearthly quiet. You could smell the salt of the bay and the marshy plain.

“God, I see what you mean about this place,” my brother’s girlfriend said. “It’s just deadly quiet here.”

“It is eerie,” my brother said. We walked up and down the street, not talking much. We passed a house with candles burning in its windows, and many more with no lights at all.

One car drove past us, going about fifteen miles and hour.

“What are they doing here?” my brother asked,

“What are we doing here?” I said.

“Good point.”

We never saw another car. After a while we got back in ours.

“Do you want to do to the farm?” my brother asked,

“No,” I said. “That place is too much for me.”

“Me too,” my brother said. “I understand.”

“Sometimes I tell myself I’ve made this place up,” I told them, as we started to pull away.

“Tell me about it,’ my brother said, looking out the window at the marsh that pressed against the road on both sides.

“Watch the road, Hon,” he told his girlfriend. “Deer run out all the time.”

“Oh Lord, as if I wasn’t creeped out already,” she said. “It’s such a strange place.”

“It’s where we came from,” my brother said.

I looked out my window at the marsh grass, the occasional shaded houses, the long runs of field below moonlight, as we left the town of ghosts.