A Certain Slant of Light (8 page)

  
"The library," he wrote, "is a sacred place."

  
"You're supposed to be Mr. Blake," I reminded him. "At least
misspell a word here and there."

  
James thought this over and then erased
sacred
and replaced
it with
sacrid.

  
I could feel Mr. Brown moving into the far corner of my
reach. The pain crept into my bones, but I tried not to let it show.
I craved more time with James. But I also knew that it was im
portant not to let my desire pull me down, as when I had dropped
away from my host during a Shakespeare play.

  
"I'm leaving," I said.

  
"She threatens to take her pulsing goddess light from this
place," he wrote. His teasing charmed me. As I reached again for
the pencil, he hid his hand under the table, laughing at my frus
tration. Another warning chill made me recoil.

  
"If you have an idea, let's hear it." He glanced at me and
must've seen some discomfort in my eyes, for his smile fell.

  
"What the fuck are you doing?"

  
We both looked up. The instinct to lift a rifle at this animal
made me stiffen. But it was just a boy with a scar on one cheek,
wearing a stained army jacket. He frowned at James. "What're
you doing, turning into a schizo?"

  
"Hey," said James, deflated. He slid the page off the table and put it and the pencil in his pocket as the boy sat in the seat across
from us.

  
"Where've you been?" the boy asked. "It's like you don't know
us anymore."

  
"I had the flu," said James. "Puked my guts out for days."

  
"Grady said you OD'd," the boy told him, looking him up and
down, trying to determine what was different about him.

  
"Pretty close," said James.

  
I rose and began to flow slowly away. I could feel the flutter as
I passed through James—he had put out his arm, pretending to stretch, as I was leaving. We were as close to touching as one
spirit and one mortal could for a moment. I started to imagine
putting my arms around him but was stopped suddenly by a wall
of cold blocking me. Blinded, I reached up and felt wet mud, the
slime of a leaking dirt cellar or the bottom of a grave. I had let
Mr. Brown leave me behind. I pushed against the coldness, and it
gave way in messy pieces, the chill now running down over me
like rain on my face. I had no voice with which to call out. I dug
through the mud, hearing students laugh, buses, trash can lids
rattling. I felt cement under my feet, and then the darkness was
pierced with white. I was sitting in the back seat of Mr. Brown's
car, the sun blinding me in the rearview mirror.

All evening, I hovered as Mr. Brown and his wife made dinner to
gether, listened to television as they paid bills, read, and talked in
bed. After they had turned off the light and settled into each
other's arms, just as I was passing through the wall into the gar
den, Mr. Brown's voice stopped me.

  
"I thought of a baby name."

  
"Boy or girl?" she asked.

  
"Erin," he said. "Could go either way."

  
I had never heard them discuss children except as a distant
possibility during their courtship. The idea frightened me. By
their words I knew that this was a conversation that had been visited many times, most likely while I gave them time alone in bed.
All my past hosts had been childless. I had not been drawn to
children over the decades; nor had I been repelled by them on
trains, in parks, laughing in the nurseries of homes my hosts vis
ited, but this was different. This would be the flesh of my host. A
child in my every room and in each hour of my existence.

  
"Spelled how?" asked Mrs. Brown.

  
"A I R O H N G," he said.

  
She laughed in the dark.

  
"Silent G," he explained.

  
I stayed perfectly still, half in and half out of the bedroom
wall.

  
"Maybe for a girl," she said. "Got any other boy names?"

  
"Chauncey."

  
Mrs. Brown let out another laugh. "We'll have to fork it out
for those karate lessons so he won't get thrashed every day."

  
"Okay, how about Butch?" said Mr. Brown. "For a girl."

  
It was dark, but I saw him stop her laugh with a kiss.

  
"Let's get started then," she said.

  
"I thought you wanted to wait so you wouldn't be a blimp in
the summer."

  
"I don't mind, as long as you wait on me hand and foot."

  
I fled the rustle of sheets and hovered in the living room.
Something stronger than logic tore at me. I drifted restlessly
through their other rooms, sometimes shifting a curtain or making the floor creak without meaning to. I was a caged panther. I
sat on their roof and stared at the stars, but I couldn't explain my
terror. Was it some instinctual knowledge that an infant would be
aware of my presence? That thought knotted at my throat. Would a baby be frightened of me? Some deep voice answered yes, you
are a danger to children. I realized suddenly that I no longer felt
welcome in Mr. Brown's house. I was an intruder. I tried to re
member feeling at home in the houses of my other hosts but in
stead saw a hideous flash of a cellar door and a shelf of baskets. I
flew to the car, thinking I might feel safer there, but as I sat in
the dark garage, huddled in the back seat, I began to weep. I wept
a waterless river, sobbing without relief. I thought of running
away to the classroom or the library, but I knew I could not. They
were too far away. I couldn't go alone. I was a prisoner, crying
bone-dry tears until the morning.

Four

The NEXT MORNING, I meant to watch Mr. Brown write, but as I
circled his desk, I kept thinking about James and worrying about
a baby at the Browns' house. When the first bell rang, I looked
down at the manuscript. Mr. Brown had written and erased the
same sentence so many times, the paper had worn through.

  
By the time James's class began to arrive that afternoon, I was fairly humiliated by my own need for comfort. I sat in the desk in
the last row and wouldn't meet James's eyes as he sat down beside
me. I could tell, by the way he was watching me without speak
ing, that he sensed something was wrong. Mr. Brown was leafing
through papers on his desk. He stopped on one and silently read it
back and front.

  
"Listen up," he said then. "Here's a good example of descrip
tion." Then he read aloud: "The library smells like old books—a
thousand leather doorways into other worlds." Mr. Brown paused
and glanced up at the room, but especially at James for one mo
ment. "I hear silence, like the mind of God. I feel a presence in
the empty chair beside me. The librarian watches me suspi
ciously. But the library is a sacred place, and I sit with the patron saint of readers." Mr. Brown paused as he stared at the page, and
then read, "Pulsing goddess light moves through me for one mo
ment like—" Here Mr. Brown paused again. "Like a glimpse of eternity instantly forgotten. She is gone. I smell mold, I hear the
clock ticking, I see an empty chair. Ask me now and I'll say this is
just a place where you can't play music or eat. She's gone. The li
brary sucks."

  
Two boys laughed, but it was a quiet, half-hearted sound that died in the silence. Mr. Brown was staring at the page, though he
had read every word there. Perhaps he was staring at the white
spaces in between. I turned to James, who was looking down at
his hands. Finally Mr. Brown put the paper on his desk with de
liberation.

  
"Why was that a good description?" he asked the class.

  
" 'Cause the library does suck," one boy near the front snorted.

  
Mr. Brown ignored the giggles and looked from face to face with a kind of awe, as if he had never seen his students, or any
thing as fascinating, before.

  
A girl in the front row raised a hesitant hand. Mr. Brown nodded at her. "Because he said how it smelled and sounded, not just
how it looked?" she asked.