Lost Boy Lost Girl

whose parents bred border collies, and the dioramas of alert-looking Indians and Mr. and Mrs. Neanderthal in the Millhaven County Museum retained nothing of their old ramshackle appeal. And his almost magically clueless parents would never find out in a million years, but the nature trail had disappeared when a budget cut had let the banks of the Kinninnick revert to a secretive brushy wasteland lately popular, according to the teenage bush telegraph, as a pickup bazaar for gay men.

Mark did not enjoy lying to his mother, but he was sure that telling her the truth would give rise to a hundred new questions, none of which he could answer. He could not explain why he should have become so fascinated by the house on Michigan Street, but fascinated he was. He would no longer have argued with the word “obsessed.” In fact, Mark liked being obsessed. Being obsessed absorbed into itself a good deal of his concern about his mother. When his attention was focused on the house, his mother might as well have been on the other side of the world.

Or on the moon. The house seemed to vacuum his ordinary concerns out of his mind and replace them with itself. Although Mark knew that his idea was absurd, 3323 North Michigan Street felt as much an active partner in his obsession as himself. Present from the first moment the place revealed itself to him, the sense that it possessed a will, even the capacity for desire, had taken hold in him while he and Jimbo had stood before it with their skateboards in their hands. When they returned to Michigan Street, Mark could feel in himself very little of the afternoon’s hesitancy. Half of him wanted to go up the flagged walk and prowl around the house; the other half was content to do no more than stand on the sidewalk and let his eyes roam over the roofline, the porch, the front windows. Dark to the point of opacity that afternoon, the windows were now, a couple of days later, a dead, flat black. To see anything through them, he would have to hold a flashlight up to the glass.

What would the flashlight reveal? An empty room. There was no point in even thinking about going in there. Mark had no interest in seeing a handful of dusty, long-neglected rooms.

Yet something kept him rooted to the sidewalk, resisting Jimbo’s irritated suggestions that they go back to his house and watch some TV.

After twenty minutes, Jimbo persuaded him to leave. The two of them went to his house and spent hours switching back and forth between music videos and foul-mouthed cartoons on the elderly fifteen-inch Motorola in Jimbo’s room. At ten-fifteen, he went downstairs; did his utmost not to ogle Margo Monaghan while bidding good night to her and a red-faced Jackie, tilting a nice slug of Powers Whiskey into his glass; proceeded homeward past vacant porches and lighted windows, in his mind seeing only the dull, remembered face of Shane Auslander and hoping that he had run away to Chicago, or New Orleans, or somewhere else where weed was plentiful; turned up his own path to his own porch and let himself in through his own unlocked front door; and for some reason experienced a burst of apprehension instantly rationalized by his father’s growl of unwelcome.

Philip looked at his watch. “Break out the champagne, he’s a whole five minutes ahead of his curfew.”

“I was watching TV at Jimbo’s,” he said.

Supine on the davenport, his mother pulled herself from the depths to ask, “You were there all night?”

“Pretty much,” he said. “We went over to the fountain for a little bit.”

“I don’t like that crowd at the fountain,” Philip said. “Trouble just waiting to happen.”

Upstairs, Mark switched on the radio. An old Prince tune filled the air with a toxic perfume. He unlaced his sneakers and tossed them toward the closet. Mark peeled off his shirts and let them drop to the floor. Ditto his socks. Soon afterward, his teeth brushed and various previously unwashed parts of his body more or less washed, he was back in his room picking up his jeans and putting clothes into the wicker hamper. While engaged in these humble duties, Mark remembered that his window looked directly down at the alley, and also, therefore, onto the rear of the house across the alley. He dropped his clothes, scrambled across the room to the window, and thrust his head and shoulders into the humid night.

Light from his window and from the kitchen beneath made pale, oblong rectangles on the patchy yard. Beyond the rectangles of light could be seen only shapes and the vague suggestions of shapes. A faint gleam on the boards of the ruined fence led toward the hazy darkness of the alley, its dimensions sketched by faint moonlight. Beyond the outline of the eight-foot wall loomed the bushy crowns of trees. Mark had the faint memory, more like that of something glimpsed in passing than actually seen, of the great trees rising behind the cement wall. For a moment, disappointment like a red-hot awareness of loss burned at the center of his body. He would never be able to see the back of that house from his window, at least not until October, when the leaves fell.

How many Octobers had he—

—without once bothering to look—

Mark switched on his bedside lamp, punched off the main bedroom light, and padded back to bed to continue reading the book he had taken a few days earlier from a shelf in the kitchen, a previously unopened copy of one of his uncle’s novels that had been inscribed to his parents. For Philip and Nancy/Something for the wee hours/With Love,/Tim. A sporadic reader at best, Mark had been reluctant to sample his uncle’s work, but he had soon found himself enjoying The Divided Man. It had a built-in dread that made him want to keep reading, and to judge by the street names, a big part of the book seemed to be set in Millhaven. Twenty minutes later, the lines of print began to melt into dream-sentences. He turned off his light, rolled over, and fell effortlessly into unconsciousness.

As a cabbie dreams of driving, a baker of his loaves, Mark dreamed of standing on the pavement in front of the abandoned house, now abandoned no longer. Men and women, some of them with children, congregated on the narrow porch and passed in and out of the front door. Whenever Mark looked at the front windows, he saw the partygoers, the visitors, the celebrants moving around in the crowded living room. Among those arriving were policemen, ax-carrying firefighters in yellow-striped coats, and sailors in dress whites, a UPS driver, his father’s boss, a man in a diving suit and scuba gear . . . and some small children, four-year-olds he had known in nursery school but had not seen since. Whenever the front door opened, cheerful music came to him. Mark felt an overwhelming desire to go up onto the porch and join the party, but some mysterious reluctance held him back. He felt shy, awkward, out of place: apart from Mr. Battley, who didn’t count, the only people he knew were the nursery school children.

From the porch, a famous blue eye winked at him, and a famous smile stopped his heart: Gwyneth Paltrow! And who stood beside her but Matt Damon, grinning like crazy and winding his hand in the air, saying Come on, Mark, get up here! And there, beside Matt Damon, was Vince Vaughn, surely; and peeking out from behind Vince, wasn’t that Steven Spielberg, with his arm around Jennifer Lopez? You know you belong here with us, Gwyneth’s smile said. I can’t believe how stupid you’re being!

Resist Gwyneth Paltrow? Hold out against Gwynnie? He stepped off the sidewalk onto the walkway and began to move toward the party. As he approached, the people on the porch began to slip into the house, first Steven Spielberg and J.Lo, then Ben Affleck—whom he hadn’t even seen before!—and Matt Damon, then even Gwynnie, and by the time he reached the steps only two skeletally thin policemen remained on the porch, gazing down at him with their hats pushed back on their heads and their collar buttons undone. Their teeth jutted from their shrunken gums like the teeth of the dead. No more than skin adhering to bone, the policemen leaned toward him. From the house came an odor of rot, floating atop a sour wave of hurdy-gurdy music. One of the cops reached out to take his hand, and Mark understood that this jackal-like figure, no more alive than an image on an Egyptian tomb, wanted him to meet Shane Auslander. He jolted back, his heart accelerating in shock and fear, and saw that he had not been quick enough. The jackal’s dirt-encrusted hand had already closed on the fabric of his sleeve. Mark screamed in panic and without transition found himself sitting up in bed, panting as though he had run a marathon.

Gradually his panic left him, and he got out of bed and went to his window. Out in the night, something happened: a bloated, dark shape melted through the barbed wire at the top of the wall and—he thought—dropped into the alley. It might have been a cat; it might have fallen inside the wall, not into the alley. Mark’s reawakened terror, cold as dry ice, brushed his stomach and his lungs. That had not been a cat, unless cats grew to the size of pigs. And he was almost certain that it had jumped down into the alley.

Fear made him imagine the thick, somehow misshapen thing sliding across the alley and crawling over his father’s useless fence. Unable to move or look away, Mark peered down. It was there; it wasn’t; it was. Too frightened to close his window against whatever might be invading his backyard, he put his hands on the sill and leaned out. A vague movement in the darkness below showed him the creature sliding down the pitch of the fence and moving closer to the house. Soon it will have come halfway across the yard, and then . . . Two shiny orbs, cold