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.

Come a Little Closer So I Can See Your Face

The summer afternoon has made the Northeast Ohio air heavy, so we draw the curtains and drape dark blue sheets over the windows. The bedroom is submerged deep in the ocean. We crank the air conditioning.

“Twenty thousand leagues,” she says to me.

“Slumberland,” I say.

We are playing the connection game. Sometimes it goes on for hours, but because of the heat the play gets slack and ends up in silence. The old and inefficient air conditioner clunks and mumbles through the long pause. She parts my legs softly with her smooth thigh, so we fit together. She could do this motion a thousand times and never repeat herself.

“Blue’s no good,” she tells me. “I’ll fall asleep.”

I stand up on the windowsill and pull down the sheet, exchanging blue for deep red, the color of a closed eyelid.

“Are you ready yet?” she asks.

In the brief moment between the two colors, the street opens up beyond the window. Rain has been here and gone. Who wants to watch water just sitting there, hidden in the atmosphere, uselessly hanging? The only thing moving is a cat, stalking the sidewalk, sniffing for food or sex or shelter.

“Take your place,” she says, spreading her arms out on either side. A stripe of sunlight on her chest shows the thin blue veins around her nipples which I love to kiss.

I put on the red sheet and everything softens to a warm, crimson glow.

 

We go out to shop one at a time. Each week we take turns. Go down our street – a cul-de-sac – and then down a brief bend, and you find the shopping center. The sidewalk stops at the busy intersection, so you have to walk on the dewy grass until you hit the pavement, littered with cigarette butts. No one ever stands and smokes, but you can see evidence of their presence, lingering. Sometimes I make the whole walk and never see a single soul.

Inside the grocery store is often empty except for the clerk. It’s a different teenager every week, so I can never seem to get a handle on their names. I buy the usual assortment of vegetables, keeping an eye on the sales. We don’t want our money to run out.

“Hot, hot, hot,” I say, at the checkout.

The boy behind the counter only nods and hands me my change. He’s short, and his hair hangs greasy over his forehead; his eyebrow is pierced. He counts the bills slowly, his mind somewhere else, and I imagine what kind of dreams keep him from making conversation. All at once I realize he has earplugs in; I can hear the diminished echo of the loud music slipping from inside his eardrums. He can only see my lips moving.

Outside the sky starts to drip rain. Clouds have settled in above us. Cars pass, their wipers stirring to life.

 

She pushes me down on the bed and puts her knees on either side of me.

“I’m going to run my finger down your backbone,” she says. “Better get ready.”

I nod and wait, but she does no such thing. I shake a little, waiting for the contact. Finally, the phone rings.

“Shit,” she says, and rolls off of me.

“Are you going to answer it?” I ask, after the second ring.

“I’d prefer not to,” she says, her head balanced on her hand, looking at me.

So I stand up and walk over to the phone.

It’s an old friend of ours.

“How’s the West Coast?” I ask.

“It’s a funny thing,” he tells me. “They say the honeybees are dying, but yesterday one stung me. You can still get plenty of fruit at the market.”

“Fearmongers,” I say.

“Do you think about moving?” he asks. “Do you intend to stand still for the rest of your life? Where’s your sense of adventure?”

“The summer sinks in, it stops you from getting out much,” I say, offhandedly.

“You’re going to stay there until the money runs out,” he says.

I don’t say anything. The line gets interrupted by a sudden crunching noise.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“The highway,” he tells me. “They’re tearing up all of downtown. It’ll take years to put it back together, if ever.”

“I sympathize with your loss,” I say.

The crunching noise makes it difficult to hear, and eventually we give up.

“Give her my love,” he says, and the line goes dead.

I am sitting in front of the telephone table, considering how skinny I’ve gotten, when she walks behind me and threads her arms through mine. I look down at her hands in place of my own.

“I’m going to do something I should have done a long time ago,” she says, and reaches down to unplug the phone.

 

 

She used to be a model when she was younger. She was carried on the shoulders of linebackers down the promenade of Federal Boulevard. Her face crowned the glossy pages of supermarket advertisements. They put her on floats and sent her circling around town.

“Do you know what I thought?” she asked. “I would look out at all the people looking at me, and I’d feel like I had this unspeakable secret. I knew that eventually I was going to give them all up. I had a smaller life in my head, and I knew I was going to go there someday and leave them all behind, that I’d never stare into another camera for as long as I lived.”

I thought of her waving in that scripted way women have on floats. Her eyes would be elsewhere, avoiding the flashes in the crowd, drifting away from the clumsy pounding of the high school marching band.

“That seems sad,” I said, though I didn’t really know what there was to feel about it. It was a story that opened up a lot of ground, like sitting in the middle of an endless, unmarked field stretching out in all directions. I would wait for some wind to pick up before I started walking.

“Sometimes it made me feel sad,” she said. She peeled an orange at our kitchen table. It was night in middle summer, and the crickets were at their highest, going on and in with their fevered chanting. “Other times it made me feel powerful.”

“Powerful?” I asked.

“No matter what disaster happened,” she told me, uncurling the skin into a long, winding strip. “I always had a place to go.”

 

I go out one afternoon to pick up some batteries, and there, on the side of the main arterial, stands a brigade of older people. They are carrying signs full of irregular capitals. “Stop the Violence.” “Not in our Town.” “Never Too late.”

One of the older men notices me and hurries over. He puts a hand on my shoulder.

“How are you, brother?” he asks me. He smells of tobacco and chewed-up vitamins.

“Fine,” I say.

“Brother, do you ever get the feeling that you’re being lied to, that someone’s not telling you the whole truth?” He points a thin finger at my chest and sticks me in the ribs. “Do you ever get the sinking feeling that something is very WRONG?”

“I’m not the right person to ask about this,” I say. “I keep to myself, mostly.”

The man looks me up and down and nods, as if he can sense it on me. He has the upright, skinny look of a good stoic, and his white beard is neatly trimmed. The woman next to him, his wife, is the spry kind of older person who does stretches every morning. She smiles at me, she wants me to understand.

“If you’re interested,” he says, “if you start to get this feeling I’m speaking of, I want you to know you’re welcome here. We’re here every week.”

I nod and shake his hand. His grip is very firm and comforting. It takes me a hundred steps or more towards the grocery before it occurs to me that I have never seen them before in all my life. When I get inside the store, the price of vegetables seems unnaturally high.

 

“The pet supply store closed down,” she tells me one afternoon, after she comes back with food. “They’ve cleared the place out since I last saw it.”

“I saw some warning sign last week,” I told her. “It said something about a going-out-of-business sale. I guess I didn’t give it much attention.”

“Stores come and go.”

“We don’t have any pets,” I say. “It’s not too inconvenient.”

She waits until we’ve sat down to dinner to tell me the other part of the story. I pick at the ends of my kale, the kettle starts to whistle. Chopped ginger glistens on the cutting board.

“I think some man followed me a bit on my way back,” she says, slowly and in a quiet voice.

“A man?” I ask. “Are you sure he wasn’t just walking in the same direction?”

“No,” she says. “I don’t really know. I haven’t been followed before.”

“Describe him,” I say, although part of me doesn’t want to hear.

“Black sweatshirt, dark glasses, skinny blue jeans,” she says. “Swayed when he walked. Maybe our age. Very pale.”

“That could be anyone I know,” I say. “Give me more information.”

“I couldn’t quite see,” she protests. “He was giving me some distance.”

“But you still think he was following you?” I say.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Yes.”

I stack all the dishes in the dishwasher. Our neighbors are watching television. The blue square is shimmering in the twilight. When I look through their window I see a human face, forehead furrowed with worry. It’s a newscaster. I wish I could read lips, read minds, hear through walls.

 

One day, while she’s going to the store, I sneak over to the phone and plug it back in. I go to the kitchen and put on the kettle, and sure enough I hear it ring, right away.

It’s an old friend of mine. The connection is bad.

“I’m so glad I got through to you,” he says. “I’ve been trying to call.”

“Telephone trouble,” I say. “What’s going on?”

“There’s something,” he starts to say, but then his voice wavers in and out.

“Speak up,” I say. “You’re fading.”

Suddenly he comes rumbling back into focus.

“I’m in a lot of trouble, listen, I’m in a lot of trouble here. I don’t quite know where I am, and I was hoping you’d be able to…”

And then, sure as anything, the line goes dead.

I put the receiver back on the cradle and look at it. My heart is going a little fast, the way it used to when I would wake up with a hangover: irregular, sometimes wrong. I walk all over the living room, feel the carpet between my toes. I turn the lights on and off, and look for a long time into the print we bought three months ago, an O’Keefe print of a long, blue vista and a strong cross. The horizon suggests the presence of things behind it. I lie down on the couch and make myself very still.

I hear her coming up the walk. She doesn’t talk, doesn’t whistle, as she makes her way to the door. I get up and pull the line out of the wall and make like I was doing nothing in particular.

 

That night we pull back the blinds, but the sky is dark anyway on account of the lack of moon. Some of the houses have lights, but most of them are so blank they might as well be empty. She throws me down, I throw her down. The bed bounces with our combined weight. We wrestle with each other, stopping and starting in sudden lunges. When it’s over we’re both quiet for a while, stunned.

“I wish there was something I could do,” she tells me, “beyond that. I want to do something to you that goes above and beyond.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I say, though I have a number of ideas.

“It’s not worth talking about,” she says. “It’s not worth talking about things that’ll never happen.”

“I suppose not,” I say, running my nose up the ridge of her upper neck, where the spine pushes outward between her shoulder blades. Every curve of her body suddenly seems unaccountably precious to me.

“And if it does happen, it’ll happen all of a sudden,” she tells me. “It’ll happen of its own accord.”

“You sound so certain,” I say.

“I don’t feel certain. I feel tired.”

I turn on the radio. It seems like ages since I’ve done it. I remember a time when I was younger when late-night radio was a series of soft, whispering songs that murmured into one another like waves. I would press my ear to the speaker and let the gentle transmission vibrate the insides of my skull.

But now, on the airwaves, someone is playing a trick on someone, a prank call.

“What do you do at home when no one’s looking?” the jock asks, his voice high and nasally. Somebody snickers.

“Why did you turn that on?” she asks me, shocked. She has the covers pulled above her breasts, high on her neck.

“I remembered something,” I tell her, and reach over to turn it off again.

 

 

We try to sleep, but sometime in the night she reaches for me and shakes me awake.

“Someone’s walking on the lawn,” she says.

“I think he’s looking in the first floor windows.”

“He is, he is, he’s walking from window to window. I think I’ve seen him before.”

“Don’t move, don’t go anywhere. Stay here with me. Don’t you dare leave, he’s down there.”

“He’s stopped. He’s just standing there, looking in. I don’t know what he’s doing.”

“He’s taking a cigarette from his pocket. Now he’s lighting it. Oh, wait, he’s holding up the lighter at the edge of the window. Why’s he doing that? He should know he’s only going to see his own reflection.”

Every autumn the crickets die away. In the spring they begin chattering around the sunset, and by July they’re practically screaming. Then, as the days get a little shorter, you stop hearing them at night, when you can’t sleep. You stay up and listen to the absence of crickets.

 

The next day is clear. It makes me think maybe the autumn is finally coming, but the leaves are still on the trees as surely as if they were glued there. I put on my shoes, stand outside on our porch. The road is free of cars for a minute, then another. I pray for one to come by, telling myself that I won’t move until one does. Nothing comes along. Finally I get sick of waiting and go on my way.

I don’t see anyone on the way to the store. I take a look at the newspaper box. At first glance it looks empty, but when I reach in I pull out a paper from weeks gone by. July is gone. Did nobody replace it?

The store seems sparser than usual, and when I finish my shopping I wait in line for what seems like minutes, whistling. Nobody comes out from the back to assist me.

“Hello?” I call. “Little help? Customer on Aisle Three!”

I laugh at my own joke, but it seems hollow and forced against the shelves. Finally I give in and carry my groceries out the door, feeling someone’s hidden, watchful eyes.

 

We shower together when I get home. I run the soap over her body, her muscular back.

“What does this come from?” I ask.

“Good posture,” she says.

I am getting skinnier, I can tell, but nothing seems to diminish her: the rise of her thighs, the little belly that never disappears. She puts shampoo in my hair.

“Are you such a delicate boy?” she asks.

“Sometimes I think so,” I say. “Sometimes I’m clumsy, and I don’t know my own strength.”

“I’m not afraid of that,” she says, washing the soap from her body.

Afterwards we camp out in the living room. Owls are calling, short barking notes, every couple minutes in the trees. We grab a sleeping bag from the closet, lay it out on the floor. It’s finally cool enough to turn off the air conditioning. When I go to open the windows, she stops me.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. I leave them closed.

We flip the switch off and burn candles. I feel like I’ve never seen such warm light. We place them in a ring around our sleeping bag, loose and irregular, a series of tiny flames.

“I feel like someone’s died,” she says.

“How do you know?”

“I can feel it.”

I don’t bother to object. I’ve gotten used to relying on her magical premonitions.

We hear the footfalls on the grass. At first I dare to hope that it’s a faraway animal, but as it gets louder and closer my stomach starts to knot, I stiffen up. He mounts the porch.

There are three steady knocks on the door.

I would think she would scream, but neither of us makes any loud noise. The combined sound of our breathing is enough to cut through the silence. Muffled tread, moving from window to window, our ears fastening on the sound. Both of us are shaking inside the sleeping bag. Because of the candles we can’t see past the glass and out into the night. All that’s visible are the round stains and specks on the pane, on the dark, blank square.

“The basement,” she says.

She gets up quickly, dragging me through the kitchen before I even know what’s happening, towards the cellar stairs. I look behind me and I think I see a quick flash of movement out of the north window, a face moving behind the glass, a hood over the hair and one eye blinking.

The stairs rattle on the way down. She pulls the string on the one naked bulb, exposing the glowing filament. At the edges of the floor small insects race for the shadows; we’ve been flooded, there are puddles on the floor.

“We’ll stay here,” she says, whispering in my ear. I don’t say a word.

The recessed windows open onto the backyard. Her throat tightens, trying to swallow, the muscles sticking out from her neck. The sound of someone pacing across the empty gravel driveway, where no car sits, past the unlit windows of our neighbors, under the low-hanging branches of the trees bearing no fruit, finds its way in.

I think maybe we’ve been left alone.

Then I see a pair of shoes outside the western window, a pair of dark shoes right next to the glass. It’s no trick of the light; I can see the thick laces.

“Don’t go,” she tells me, grabbing me from behind. “Don’t look. Don’t go and look.”

The feet reposition, the knees begin to bend. Like a mechanical toy, certain in its movements, someone is stooping to look inside.

Slowly, without really thinking, I pull against her arms. Something makes me want to move forward. I’ve been waiting so long, I think, for you to show. How long have you been waiting? The cool air of the basement seeps into my skin and runs through me like a hollow reed.

She pulls harder, but I pull hardest. I’m almost free of her grip. She flails with one of her hands, leaving pink scratches down the length of my arm. It only hurts a little.

“Get back,” she says, louder.

“What?” I ask.

“Get back!”

I work loose, hearing her let out a great gasp of air as her arms recoil, leaving me free to walk over to the west window, reaching out a hand toward the brick, trying to resist closing my eyes, looking at the slow bend of his body towards me. I think to myself that it ought to be smaller, like a keyhole, or wider, like a great oak door. He’s down on his knees now. I can see his strong, pale fingers gripping the dirt.

“Come on,” I say, under my breath. “Come a little closer so I can see your face.”

I get nothing but silence in response.

“No,” she says, collapsing. “Don’t say anything. Don’t make a sound.”

I turn my ear to the glass. I ought to hear breathing: short, shallow breaths. And then I can hear it, almost too low to notice, like a long prayer: something murmuring on the other side. The voice is resonant, with an echo, like the lungs are a vast, empty chamber. What are those words I can almost hear? I take air in and hold it, waiting. Soon I’ll see what it is that’s come for us.

 

 

 

A Whole Season of Falling Down

They drove three hours toward the city. The highway was thick with trucks, and as they went in and out of tunnels Will held his breath, trapped between the crushing power of the rigs and the smooth, silent walls. Emily was driving, her eyes stuck on the road. Leaving the mountains, the trees thinned out. Ghosts of factories, cell-phone towers crowning the banks of the Schuylkill River. Through the thin stands of oak, scattered glimpses of the city skyline, and then a whole rush of it at once, around the final country bend of the road, before the trees dropped away and they entered the arterial system. Emily reached a hand across and put it on his thigh, as if to reassure him.

When they went to the company office to sign the lease, Will was surprised at the building, a looming brownstone in an upscale section of town. The apartment they were signing for was shifty; when you stuck the key in the front lock the glass door rattled in its frame.

“Which button do you think it is?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe the first floor.”

“Which one is that?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, wincing. “Just pick one.”

His knees felt cramped. The company name was mounted next to the front door in an authoritative fashion. It seemed like an endless amount of time passed before someone opened the door, enough time for people to look out their doors and notice them, just standing there.

Once inside, the office was full of chattering keys and the occasional rocking of a file cabinet, fingers casing documents for information. A couple of people were sitting on a long wooden bench, looking at their hands. The lighting was cool. All the bulbs were behind frosted glass.

“Address of the property?” a man asked them.

“4325 Crestwood, Apt 12C,” Emily said, reading it off of a card.

They put their names down. No one said anything for a while; Will was sure that someone would raise an objection, like at a wedding. Someone cleared their throat.

“Congratulations on your new apartment,” the man said. Will realized he was waiting for them to leave.

“Thanks,” Emily said, her voice strained, like she hadn’t spoken in a long time. They shuffled out the door, and when they got into the open air Will didn’t know what to say.

“Let’s celebrate,” he said, putting his arm around her.

“I don’t know,” she said, gritting her teeth in a smile. “Let’s not get too carried away. We have a long drive back home.”

“You’re right,” he said, pulling his arm back and putting it in his pocket.

“Let me call my mom and tell her the good news,” she said.

She leaned against a tree and dialed, while the wind blew her hair around her face. It was a warm day, but she was wearing a long, heavy jean skirt and a sweater. She was never one to bare too much. Even in summer she wore her shorts and short skirts begrudgingly, always tugging them down. The sun was direct; the streets were crowded with people in sunglasses, aggressively thin women in black, smoking cigarettes, walking their dogs.

“Hi, Mom,” he heard Emily say, cupping her hand around her mouth. “Yes, we’re safe.”

 

* * * * * *

By the time they got back to the house it was getting dark. They pulled off the highway, cutting back into the woods and slowly down a series of twilight roads. He knew these roads from years of driving for no real reason, a little drunk, going no place in particular. A mourning dove was calling from the roadside.

They pulled up at her parents’ house. Her mother met them, kissed Emily, wrapped him up in a hug.

“Success,” she said, and they both nodded.

“I’m tired,” Emily said, and walked on inside, leaving the two of them on the pavement to follow.

They had already eaten, but there was some food still warm on the stove, and they gave in. Emily’s father, thin and accommodating, retreated to the corner seat of the table as her mother put plates down in front of them.

“How’d it seem?” she asked.

“We didn’t see the apartment again, just signed the lease,” Emily explained, in a forced, patient voice. “We won’t move in for another week.”

“In a week you can move in?” her father asked, leaning in towards the conversation.

“Yes, in a week,” she told him.

Her mother leaned against the stove and lit a cigarette. Emily turned away from her. Will could see her eyelid twitch.

“But how’d it seem in general?” her mother asked.

“It’s a big city, Mom,” Emily said. “It’s all sorts of different things.”

Her mother nodded and blew out a large cloud of smoke.

“We won’t need the car tonight,” her mother said. “If you want to go out to Orville’s and celebrate.”

Orville’s was the only bar in town, doubling as a family restaurant. It was full in the evenings, but by the drinking hours it was sleepy, with regulars slumped all across the bar, handing trembling dollar bills to the girl behind the bar.

“I’m too exhausted,” Emily said. “I was thinking I’d just lie down.”

“Suit yourself,” her mother said. “We’ll just sit and chat with Will.”

She turned to him and smiled, and he felt a sudden urge to ask for a cigarette. He had quit months ago, but sometimes the craving came back unexpectedly.

“Well,” Emily said. “You all have fun.”

She disappeared into the hallway. After she was gone her parents both stretched their arms and legs.

“Let me grab you a beer,” her father said, and trotted over to the fridge. He put one down in front of Will. He sat down in the chair next to his, and they tapped their bottles together.

“You’re such a help, Will,” her mother said, beginning to put things away. “We’d worry more, you know.”

“We would,” her father said, peeling the label of off his beer. “It’s a real weight off of our minds.”

“It’s a nice apartment,” he told them. “It really is a nice little place. We were lucky to find it.”

“Sure sounds like it,” her father said. “Sure does.”

They sat for a while. Every few minutes Emily’s mother would finger the top of her pack of Marlboros. Years ago she would have offered one to him, but they both knew this wasn’t something he would risk, now. Though the desire to ask for one kept coming up, in waves.

“Thunderstorms expected, tomorrow,” her father said.

“Possible,” he said. “I checked the weather.”

“So you’ll be moving in a week?” her mother said, the sentence trailing up to the question.

He nodded.

“Sure enough,” she said, and began to put everything away. Will watched her do it, more carefully than he might have otherwise. Everything, all the closing of cabinets, had a hushed, final air. It was probably in deference to Emily, trying to sleep.

After a while he excused himself and went down the hall to the guest room. He opened the door with great care. The room was packed with boxes, belongings strewn everywhere. He picked through it all toward the bed.

She was lying on her back, looking up at the ceiling. She had gotten herself halfway prepared for bed, in a long, loose shirt, but her socks were still on, like she had fallen down by accident. He lay down beside her.

“Okay?” he asked.

She nodded and let out a deep breath.

“Every time I worry about anything,” she said, “I think about this bed. I don’t want to spend another second in this bed for the rest of my life.”

“We’ll be gone soon,” he told her, craning his neck to kiss her forehead. She kept her eyes trained on the ceiling.

From outside the door he could hear the mild tremors of her mother and father getting ready for bed, the water in their bathroom running in short spurts. Someone heaved a sigh. There was a clattering of pans.

“Do you know what I used to do, in the morning?” she said, pulling herself up against the headboard. “When my parents got the internet, I’d look at videos, videos of cities all over the world, before school.”

“Cities?”

“London, Chicago, New York. You can find them all if you look hard enough. Just five minutes before I had to go. And all you see is weather cameras, pointed at the sky.”

He was quiet, but he was mumbling in his mind. His fingers wanted to move across to her, but the best he could do was fidget a little. He gained ground across the bed and then lost it again, his fingers trembling.

She stiffened. He could feel it in the springs of the bed.

“I know what they say about me when I leave the room.”

“What do you mean?”

She put her hands over her eyes.

“I’m running away, I don’t know what I’m doing, I’ll be back.”

“That’s not it,” he said. The silence lingered. He didn’t know what else to say. There was too much possible treason.

“That I’m lucky to have you,” she said, and turned away, towards the wall.

He waited for her to turn back to him. Minutes went by. Was she asleep? With her face turned away, he was able to notice other things. The room began lighten as his eyes adjusted. There were the brown boxes, and shapeless sweaters cast over them; that was the first layer. Under that, beneath the obvious, were piles of papers, old diaries, even some stuffed animals left over from years past. Once he had been snooping around and found a ninth grade test, the perfect score circled in red pen. Everything pressed in on him, a gentle pressure that he eventually recognized as sleep, coming on.

Then she had her arms around him, she was apologizing, tears in her eyes.

“Will, I’m sorry, I am lucky, I know it. I’m sorry I’m like this, I’m sorry. I’m so unfair to you. You’re good, you’re good.”

He was groggy, half asleep. He put his arms around her, trying to understand what she was saying. She didn’t say anything else. They rocked back and forth like docked ships in the breeze.