A Million Windows (10 page)

During a certain few moments of a certain afternoon, the chief character of a conjectured piece of fiction spoke for the first time, or so it would have been reported in the piece of fiction, with another character, a young female character whose name he had once misread as
Dathar
. He, the chief character, could never afterwards recall what he had said to the young female character while they were walking down the ramp from the railway station after having travelled together in silence in the same railway compartment during the previous fifteen minutes. Nor could he afterwards recall what, if anything, she had said to him in reply, but after she had smiled at him when he entered her railway compartment on the following afternoon he had sat beside her as soon as a seat had become available and had talked with her.

He and she, the characters or personages or whatever else the reader may consider them, had talked thus together during the next few weeks. Their conversations had lasted for a total time of about three hours. Given that a great deal of what he heard from her would have answered questions that had occurred to him during the previous two years – what siblings had she? where had she spent her early childhood? where did
she go for her holidays? what were her favourite books? what were her hobbies? – he found it strange in later years that he failed to recall not only her answers to such questions but even his posing the questions. In later years he would sometimes feel such unease when alone with some or another female person that he could afterwards recall nothing of the experience, but he was never able to believe that he had been stricken in the presence of Darlene, as he would have learned to call her, with the sort of apprehension that overcame him in the presence of those others. The fact that he willingly met up with her on day after day for several weeks argues against his having been wary or uneasy with her as he was sometimes wary or uneasy in later years with certain female persons, dark-haired or otherwise. The preceding is the sort of sentence that might appear often among the notes made by an author committed to explaining the behaviour of his or her characters, so to call them. If I were reporting the strange forgetfulness of the chief characters of these paragraphs, I would report no more than what is reported in such as the following paragraph.

From all that she had surely said to him during three hours or more, he later recalled only one sentence or, rather, the substance of one sentence. He had never forgotten her having asked him one afternoon, while the train was approaching the suburb where they both lived, whether he was interested in – did she say
films
or
movies
or
pictures
?

Among the authors who have never been committed to explaining the behaviour, so to call it, of characters, so to call
them, are the authors who are committed to reporting a certain sort of detail. This is the detail that occurs unexpectedly and unbidden and as though meant to occupy a blank or an absence in the place where images of details or even of words or phrases or sentences appear to writers of fiction. A certain sort of writer, after having written all that could seemingly be written about a character unable to recall more than three words that might have been uttered by a certain dark-haired young woman – a certain sort of writer might have stared at those words themselves where they appeared at the end of a short paragraph; might have heard the words seeming to sound repeatedly in his mind; and might have seemed to feel the beginnings of an unease or discomfort or distaste seemingly connected with the words until there appeared in place of the words detail after detail of the sort reported in the following paragraphs.

If I know anything about him and his struggles to write fiction while recalling not seeming facts but absences, lacks, lacunae, he would sooner or later have decided that her asking him about films, or whatever was her actual word, had decided the future of their friendship, so to call it, and would have come as a relief to him. Since the afternoon when they had begun, at last, to talk together, he would have struggled during their absences from one another, and perhaps even during their brief conversations, to form some or another series of mental images linking their present unpredictable circumstances with the well-established series of future events that had seemed to him, since they had first looked at one another, their inevitable future. In short, he
would have struggled to foresee how a young woman, hardly more than a girl, and a young man, hardly more than a boy, she in a fetching uniform of brown with blue and gold trimmings and he in plain grey with a cap of faded blue – how those two could bear to spend year after year engaged in trivial matters while knowing all the while that a notable future awaited them: that they would be in due course boyfriend and girlfriend, an engaged couple, a married couple, a pair of honeymooners, and, finally, the parents of numerous children. His relief would have come from her having given away some part, at least, of the future that she foresaw for the two of them. Her question had told him that they were not merely to talk at length to one another by telephone or in one another's lounge-room; nor would they write long letters to one another. He had understood at once where her question about films was meant to lead them, and he had understood at once that he would not be led in that direction. She had answered in part his unasked question: how could she and he endure the many dull years before their dream-future overtook them? On many a Friday or Saturday evening they would sit together in the Plaza or the Paramount, which were the two cinemas in the suburb adjoining their own.

Did he never, while they talked in the train, enjoy for a little the awareness that an actual future was now before him; that he could rest for the time being from his strenuous day-dreaming and watch actual events unfolding around him and her? He recalls no such pleasant interludes. Words, words that had him constantly adjusting his assumptions of two years past, were
issuing from the mouth of someone who had been during all that time as silent as a statue and had seemed to speak only when he had willed her or, rather, her image to speak what he had composed on her behalf. Did he never, while they talked in the train, try to persuade himself that his two-years-long dream had come true: that he had now gained the friendship of a flesh-and-blood person and had no longer to court a creature of his own devising? At his desk in the house of many windows, he recalls no such efforts. All he recalls is his having decided, whether soon or late during the few weeks while they talked, that his earlier state had been preferable to his later; that he may well have been in love with Dathar but he could never be in love with Darlene.

Their suburb was a new suburb that had been a few years previously a cluster of industrial buildings surrounded by swampy paddocks and bisected by a railway line. His and her families were unusual, the parents having paid deposits on cheap weatherboard houses after having lived for years in rented cottages in inner suburbs. Most families in the suburb were young couples, as they were called, with two or three small children. Hardly any householder owned a car. Buses carried women to the shopping centre in the adjoining suburb, families to church on Sunday, and, on Friday evening and Saturday evening, a mixture of persons to the two rival cinemas mentioned earlier. His mother had occasionally taken him and his brother on the picture bus, as it was called, to watch some or another comedy film at the Plaza or the Paramount. The bus had been always crowded – these were the years before television – and the pairs
of passengers who had seemed to him boyfriends and girlfriends were dressed in what were almost certainly their best outfits and conducted themselves as though an evening at the Plaza or the Paramount was one of the chief events in their lives.

Only four years after Darlene had asked whether he was interested in films, he had begun writing in a journal long essays meant to decide how he could best express the wealth of meaning that he felt urged to express: whether the best means available to him was film or live theatre or prose fiction or poetry. The writer of the essays thought highly of film, but the young man, hardly more than a boy, who was asked about his interest in films thought at once not of a screen covered by images expressing a wealth of meaning but of the dark interior of the picture bus late on a Friday or a Saturday evening. The young persons in the bus, some of them no older than himself and the young woman who had questioned him, had seemed to expect much from film while they had travelled in the bus, a few hours earlier, towards the Plaza or the Paramount but had seemed on their journey homeward to have been disappointed. The young man who had been questioned and who had sometimes himself travelled with his mother in the picture bus could not have explained the disappointment of the young travellers homeward, but some or another man in the same wing of this building where I presently sit writing – some or another man may be about to write that the travellers homeward had earlier looked forward to seeing images of actual persons in actual places by definition more worthy of notice than the streets through which the picture bus
travelled; the travellers had been able for a few hours to study the behaviour of their betters and to learn superior ways of dressing, of speaking, of kissing, even. Now, the travellers were back in the picture bus, and even if they turned away from one another and looked hopefully outwards they saw only vague images of themselves in an image-bus travelling through actual darkness.

In a work of fiction intended to provide its readers with the sort of experience available to watchers of film, a young male character might well be reported as seeing in his mind image after image of himself and a young female character while he and she travelled in the picture bus from their suburb to a neighbouring suburb, while they sat together in the Plaza or the Paramount, and while they later travelled homeward in the bus. The images would have appeared to the young male character soon after he had been asked by the young female whether he was interested in pictures; by which she meant sequences of images shown in places such as the Plaza or the Paramount. The same images would have appeared again to the young male character on the afternoon after he had been questioned and while he was walking with deliberate slowness through the streets of the inner suburb where he attended school so that he would arrive at the railway station after his usual train had left.

He recalls little. He may even have travelled with Darlene on a few more afternoons and talked with her as before, but within a few days he was travelling home alone on a later train. He had simply withdrawn; he had fled; he had run away from her. He doubts whether he felt any shame. For many years afterwards,
he could not conceive of any different course available to him, given the sort of person he was at the time. He went on living in the same suburb for four more years. He travelled often by train and shopped often in the adjoining suburb and even went occasionally with his mother or his brother to the Plaza or the Paramount but he always remembered to look out for her in the distance. Sometimes he saw her from far off and loitered or changed direction. If they had suddenly come face to face, he would have dropped his eyes and hurried by.

One of the daily newspapers at that time included a weekly column offering advice to persons with problems, mostly of the sort that might have been called romantic. He read the column sometimes. The persons with problems used pen-names such as ‘Puzzled' or ‘Confused' or ‘Heart-broken' and no detail of their addresses was ever published, not even the name of their suburb or town, so that he thought of them as belonging to an adult society almost as remote as that depicted in films. At some time during the first months after he had ceased to travel with Darlene, he had read the following answer to a questioner. (Not even the actual questions were published – only the columnist's answers.) ‘What a churlish fellow! Seemingly he did not wish to continue the friendship but lacked the moral courage to say so. Forget about him. You are well rid of him.'

If ever he had asked himself, during all the years since, how a person might feel on seeming to recognise as a version of himself or herself some or another personage in a work of fiction, then he ought to have tried to recall whatever he had felt on learning
that a wise and eloquent female person in a tall city building, seated at a desk covered with letters from hundreds of puzzled or confused young female persons, had read a report of certain behaviour of his, and had declared in writing to her many thousands of readers that he was a moral coward who deserved to be forgotten by the young woman who had exchanged glances with him for two years. Sometimes, in later years, he supposed that his having read the answer quoted ought to have shamed and humiliated him; that he ought to have felt as though he had been dragged by uniformed female attendants to the desk of the columnist herself who, dressed in the costume of the Queen Bee or the Empress of the Amazons, had shrieked to his face that he lacked moral courage. He suspects, however, that his main concern was that Darlene had not understood his motives for ending their friendship, as she must have described it.

He must also have been affected by the fact of Darlene's having written about him. On some or another evening, she had sat with pen and paper and had focused her thoughts on some or another image of him. He must have been thus affected, because the only other details that he recalls from that time are phrases from a letter that he found himself often composing in his mind: a letter that he might have sent to Darlene in order to explain his odd-seeming behaviour and perhaps even to suggest that he and she should become pen-friends for the time being. Perhaps he was dissuaded from writing the letter only by his not knowing Darlene's address. Few households in the outer suburbs had telephones at that time, and neither his nor Darlene's parents
were listed in the directory. He knew the name of her street, but it was a long street and his only means of learning the number of her house might have been to follow her homeward at a distance as he had tried to follow homeward the first of his dark-haired girlfriends-in-the-mind. Any letter would have had to be sent in care of the columnist, the giver of advice, and she who had urged Darlene to forget him might have refused to pass his letter on.