Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois (47 page)

Uncertainly, John takes off his shirt, and lets the sun bake his back. He moves uncomfortably, uncrossing and refolding his legs, lifting the binder from his lap and placing it in the grass before him. He is painfully aware of the unhealthy pallor of his skin, and he begins thinking, in a disjointed fashion, of sickness, of enclosure: of decay embodied in the image of a wax flower yellowing with age—death so gradual, so subtle and imperceptible that it is not so much a transition between states as an intensifying of a long-existing condition, and even the soul involved may be unable to tell when life ended and death began, or if it yet has, or even if there is any difference between the two. He stretches an arm out along the grass, fish-belly white against new green, and has to reassure himself that he can still feel the blood throbbing in his neck, at the temples, in the wrists; that he still breathes, that he has not forgotten to live.

Birches sigh and toss overhead, and he looks up. The perfection of the weather is somehow alien, even more so than the grey, distorting twilight that had greeted him upon his arrival. Everything within the limits of his vision is endowed with an excessive clarity. There is a feeling of craft behind each incidence of light, the fall of every shadow, the position of the smallest rock: as if the world was some fantastic simulacrum—three-dimensional and discernible by all the senses—painted over another and more complex reality.

This thought disturbs him greatly, and he looks down again. He is suddenly afraid that if he continues to watch he may see the world waver and go out like an abruptly extinguished candleflame, and that beyond the guttering of the universal ember he will see—something else. What that something else, that other thing, may be he does not know. He is afraid of that moment of clear sight.

Silly, he thinks. Naive and juvenile, as have been all his moods and preoccupations since coming to this country house. He can imagine the scorn of his intellectual friends in London and Boston, the curiously similar—although differently motivated—contempt of his stolid, cannery-owning father, the needle-sharp disdain of his former fiancée, tough-minded, intensely practical Marilyn. But he cannot control the swing and scurry of his emotions. Like nervous fish, they dart where they will, unpredictably, and he cannot stop them.

To distract himself, John opens his notebook, selects a page, flattens it out with his hand. He bends close over the page, feeling the sun like a heel on the top of his head. But, to his dismay, he discovers that he cannot read. The ability is gone, wiped away as if it had never existed. There is a year’s worth of work in the notebook, the only remains of his once-promising career, and he cannot read it. He can admire the words as objects, but he cannot decipher them. The shadows of the tall grass can be seen on the lined paper—one scheme of order imposed over another—and he watches them instead, in bemused fascination. The calligraphy of the shadows is exquisite: they look like actual brush strokes on the page, clean-bordered black lines. The sun also casts the silhouette of an insect onto the page—a shadow spider crawling along a blade of shadow grass, a reflection of some negative and polar universe. He lifts his gaze slightly to locate the real spider, and then manages to watch both it and its doppelganger at once: the real spider crawling up the grass blade and away from him, while the shadow spider crawls down the page toward him, simultaneously. An insect in the grass, the earth spinning in space—both mated by shadow. He tries to touch the silhouettes of grass and spider. He cannot—there is nothing but the feel of paper under his fingers, and the shadow spider now clambers distortedly over his knuckles. Neither can he feel the ink that forms the words on the page, though he knows that it, too, is there.

As he watches, a word pulls itself up out of the paper, and scurries away.

There is a moment of vertigo, and then he realizes that it is a beetle that has been resting quietly on the page and has been disturbed by the movement of his hand: he has mistaken it for an ink-blotted word. Not reassured, he eyes the remaining script with a new suspicion, half suspecting that it intends a mass rebellion and exodus. His stomach churns with nausea: fear of that breath of wind that will extinguish the world, dread that he may have just seen things swim and shiver in a premonitory eddy.

John puts the binder down and slowly gets to his feet. He sways, drained of all strength. The impressions of the afternoon are beyond his ability to analyze or interpret. They call up only a welter of ambiguous and contradictory emotion. He hurries to the house, following the flagstone path, thinking only of rest and sanctuary, hoping he will not fall. He has gained the shelter of the back porch before he realizes that he has left his notebook behind, on the lawn.

He does not go back for it.

That evening he is assaulted by sound. As soon as the sun has disappeared completely behind the horizon and darkness is absolute, the noises begin—all at once, already at full volume, as if they have been turned on by a switch: the chirruping of crickets and the strident peeping of tree frogs, the soughing of the wind and the tossing and scratching of tree branches against the walls, at the windows. They are all normal, expected sounds, but tonight they seem horrescently, unbelievably loud: a wailing, baying, screaming cacophony. Even the boards under his feet cry out, moaning like lepers, groaning and shrieking with every step. “Settling”—so he tells himself, and even he is not sure whether he intends irony.

A heavy branch begins to pound against the side of the house, setting up a giant, rattling reverberation that makes him think of the parable of the bridge and the soldiers marching in step. He feels embattled against the noises, menaced by them—they seem alive, directed by malice: certainly they are probing and slamming against the walls in search of a weak spot, trying to find a way in, to get at him. The clamor is as solid as a hedge—he can visualize it surrounding the house, curling in a cap over the roof, pressing tightly against the windows, waiting for a pinprick hole, waiting to fill the vacuum.

Window glass buzzes and vibrates behind his head; he will not turn around to look. He has been sitting in the writing room, at one of the mahogany tables, trying to compose a letter to his friend in Boston, the friend who has lent him the use of this house during his prolonged “vacation” away from the city. His recovery, he thinks, not believing that either. He puts down his pen, crumples the piece of paper he has been writing on and throws it away. The trash receptacle, and the area surrounding it, are littered with similar balls of discarded paper. He knows that he should write a letter to his friend, indeed that he is obligated to: to reassure the friend that he has arrived safely, that all is “well,” to assuage, however insincerely, any fears the friend might have as to John’s mental and physical well-being. At very least a note to the friend and the friend’s wife, congratulating them on the new child. But he cannot write the letter. On all the discarded pieces of paper he has managed to write no more than the formal, salutatory heading.

Disgruntled, John gets up and goes into the kitchen. The wind follows him from window to window, rattling the panes. For the first time since his arrival, he opens the liquor cabinet. He finds a dusty bottle of Hennessy cognac at the back of the shelf, breaks the seal, and pours himself a large drink, in a water glass. Holding the glass in one hand, the bottle in the other, he returns through the writing room to the living room. He stands before the fireplace for a long time, listening to the unnatural howl and clatter outside, the crickets that sound as loud as barrages from siege-guns. Then he sips his drink, wincing at its harsh savor. He puts the bottle down on the mantelpiece and selects one of the leather-bound volumes from the shelf, opening it at random. The words crawl across the page, cryptic and indecipherable—they are totally alien. He is even beginning to forget what they are for; he can remember that there is a purpose behind them, but he is no longer sure exactly what the purpose is, or why he should remember it. He puts the book back sadly, as if he is packing away a world. He knows that he will never open another one. He takes a deeper drink, lowering the level of the glass by half an inch. He carries the glass and the bottle upstairs with him to his room, closing himself inside again. This time he leaves the lights blazing on the floor below. They remain on all night.

The following morning is grey and wet—a thick ground mist encircling the house, the birches dimly visible behind it, like ghost ships through fog. Somewhere behind the mist is the sound of a light rain. John stands in the kitchen, waiting for a pot of coffee to perk, listening to the unseen rain, watching moisture bead on a half-opened window, on the dusty webbing of the screen. The sound of the rain is a low, melancholy murmur, like water mumbling down the mossy sides of an ancient well. The sound makes him unexpectedly sad. He pulls his robe tighter around him, gathering it at the collar. The wind through the open window is chill and damp, smelling somehow of the ocean—of salt flats and tides and depths—although he is hundreds of miles from the shore. It almost seems that he can hear patient waves slap against the side of the house, behind the mist, behind the morning. If the mist should burn away now, he knows that he would see a shining, placid sheet of ocean stretching endlessly away on all sides of the house, over the foundered hills and fields, the branches of trees waving above the surface like the dead and beckoning arms of the drowned.

He shivers, and lights the gas oven for warmth: the sharp, sudden hiss of the gas jet, the rasp of the kitchen match, the solid thunking whoosh as the jet ignites. The blue glow washes back over his face, smoothing out the deep hollows of his cheeks, striking reflections from his eyes, painting unknown cabalistic symbols across his forehead in light. He shakes the match and throws it away. He stands before the open oven door for a while, rubbing his hands, flexing his fingers. The room is filled with the pungent, strangely pleasant smell of escaped gas, and with the hiss of the burning jet.

The coffee perks, and John sits down at the table. He cannot eat—the very thought is repugnant. He drinks a cup of coffee, and then another. That at least is still permitted. Steam rises from the coffee, and through it he watches sodden azalea branches tap against the windowpane, drip tears across the glass. He will not yield to the impulse to pace. That is a nervous habit. He drinks coffee with grim determination, raising and lowering the cup mechanically. His feet shuffle uneasily under the table. He has been too isolated, he tells himself. That is why he is so high-strung and distracted. He has always been so proud of his devotion to his Art, his detachment, the degree to which he has been able to dissociate himself from the mundane concerns of everyday existence. His Art—he even thinks of it that way, capitalized, deified. Now he is starting to regard his poses and pretensions with aversion. They are contrived, artificial, jejune. He will make an effort to rejoin the mainstream of humanity, he will mingle with people again. Hike into town, get to know the citizenry, make friends. Maybe get invited to someone’s house for dinner, and return the favor later—it would be good to hear a voice in the house other than his own. He will get back into the swim of life, he tells himself, smiling at the trite phrase. But it is applicable and appropriate, nevertheless. He drinks more coffee. After an hour, most of the mist has boiled away, revealing the road, the further stand of birches, a grey and lowering sky. There is no ocean. He wonders if he really expected there to be one.

About noon, the grocer’s route man pulls up before the back porch in a small panel truck. The rain is coming down now in steady pounding sheets—not quite a cloudburst, but a hard fall. The noise is like distant gunfire. The dirt road has turned to mud: the truck wheels spatter it, leaving great ruts in the road. John stares, fascinated, holding his cup suspended in the air. He has been taken by surprise by the intrusion, although now he dimly remembers the agency man telling him that he’d send the grocer around in a few days. He sets the cup down precisely on a coffee ring, with a click. The groceryman wiggles out of the cab, jumps down into the mud, and runs for the porch, brandishing his arms over his head as if to keep off rabid bats or bees. Certainly he does not keep off the rain: he is wet and stomping by the time he reaches the porch.

John gets up from the table to let the groceryman inside. The groceryman greets him with a nod, and a caustic remark about the weather: his clothes steam, rain drips from his faded parka. John offers the groceryman coffee; the groceryman thanks him, takes off his wet parka, drapes it across a radiator and settles down familiarly at the table. John gets him coffee, automatically drawing one for himself, and sits down at the other end of the table. Bemused, he stares surreptitiously at the groceryman. It has been only four days, and already he has forgotten what another human being looks like. The groceryman’s face, his voice, his pattern of gestures and mannerisms, all are radically different from John’s, from what he has become accustomed to thinking of, in such a short time, as an absolute standard, as the only aspect possible for these attributes. He is startled and shaken by the individuality of the groceryman, and somewhat repulsed—as if he was someone who, while exploring a distant wilderness, has suddenly come upon an unknown, unsuspected, and not altogether wholesome species of animal.

The groceryman is voluble, shrewd in a wry Yankee fashion, and apparently not indisposed by the necessity of keeping up both ends of the conversation at once. He rambles on, expansively and with studied quaintness, about trivial matters of the town and the country, about the spell of bad weather that year, the real estate scandals, and then—with a sly glance at John to see if his worldly sophistication is being appreciated—widens out his talk to include the recent abdication of President Beneš of Czechoslovakia, and the lynching of a German immigrant up in Scranton. Obviously he considers himself something of a raconteur, and is proud of the knowledgability he manages to maintain here in the back country. John lets the groceryman talk—he is being made increasingly uneasy by the grating and annoying—to him—sound of the groceryman’s voice, and by the obscure feeling that he should somehow respond to the overture of friendship being made by the other man, and by the numbing realization that he cannot. So he says nothing, and pointedly does not offer to refill the groceryman’s cup when the coffee is gone. The groceryman takes the hint; his face suddenly sets itself up as cold and hard as weathered granite.