see outside of you, you see inside of you;
it is visible and is your garment.
Before long, the words swam together and became different words altogether, and I managed to close the book and turn off the light before I dropped into sleep.
At four o'clock, I came irretrievably awake from a dream in which a hideous monster searched for me in a dark basement, and lay in bed listening to my heart thud against my chest. After a moment I realized that the rain had stopped. Laszlo Nagy was a better meteorologist than most weathermen.
For a while I followed the advice I always give myself on sleepless nights, that rest is the next best thing, and stayed in bed with my eyes closed. My heart slowed down, and I breathed easily and regularly while my body relaxed. An hour passed. Every time I turned the pillow over, I caught the traces of some florid scent and finally realized that it must have been whatever perfume or cologne Marjorie Ransom put on before she went to bed. I threw back the sheet and went to the window. Black, oily-looking fog pressed against the glass. The street lamp out on the sidewalk was only a dim, barely visible yellow haze, like the sun in a Turner painting. I turned on the overhead light, brushed my teeth and washed my face, and went downstairs in my pajamas to work on my book.
For another hour and a half I inhabited the body of a small boy whose bedroom walls were papered with climbing blue roses, a boy whose father said he struck him out of a great, demanding love, and whose mother lay dying in a stink of feces and decaying flesh. We're taking good care of this woman here, his father said, our love is better for her than any hospital. Beneath Charlie Carpenter's skin, Fee Bandolier watched his mother drifting out into blackness. I was in the air around him, Fee and not-Fee, Charlie and not-Charlie, watching and recording. When the sorrow became too great to continue, I put down the pencil and went back upstairs on trembling legs.
It was about six. I had this odd sense—that I was lost. John's house seemed no more or less real than the smaller house I had imagined around me. If I had still been drinking, I would have had two inches of John's hyacinth vodka and tried to get to sleep again. Instead, I checked the window—the fog had turned to a thick, impenetrable silver—took a quick shower, dressed in jeans and Glenroy's black sweatshirt, put my notebook in my pocket, and went back down to go outside.
The world was gone. Before me hung a weightless gauze of light grayish silver which parted as I passed through and into it, reforming itself at a constant distance of four or five feet before and behind me. I could see the steps going down to the walk, and the tall hedges on either side of the lawn tinged the silver dark green. The moist, chill air settled like mist against my face and hands. I moved toward the haze of the street lamp.
Out on the sidewalk, I could see the dim, progressively feebler and smaller points of light cast by the row of street lamps marching down Ely Place toward Berlin Avenue. If I counted them as I went along, as the child-me had counted the rows in the movie theater to be able to return to my seat, the lamps would be my landmarks. I wanted to get out of John's house for a little while; I wanted to replace Marjorie Ransom's tropical perfume with fresh air, to do what I did in New York, let the blank page fill itself with words while I moved thoughtlessly along.
I went three blocks and passed six lamps without seeing a house, a car, or another person. I turned around and looked back, and all of Ely Place except the few feet of sidewalk beneath my feet was a shimmering silver void. Seeming a long way away, much more distant than I knew it was, a circular yellow haze burned feebly through the bright emptiness. I put my back to it again and tried to look across what had to be Berlin Avenue.
But it didn't look like Berlin Avenue—it looked exactly like the other three intersections I had come to, with a low rounded curb and a flat white roadbed partially and intermittently revealed through gaps in the stationary fog. The gleam of the next streetlight cut through the fog ahead of me. Ely Place ended at Berlin Avenue, and there should have been no streetlight ahead of me. Maybe, I thought, one stood directly opposite Ely Place, on the other side of the avenue. But in that case, shouldn't it have been farther away?
Of course I could not really tell the distance between me and the next lamp. The fog made that impossible, distancing objects where it was thickest, bringing them nearer where it was less dense. I almost certainly had to be standing on the corner of Ely Place and Berlin Avenue. Starting at John's house, I had walked three blocks west. Therefore, I had reached Berlin Avenue.
I'll walk across the avenue, I thought, and then go back to John's. Maybe I could even get some sleep before the day really began.
I stepped down onto the roadbed, looking both ways for the circular yellow shine of headlights. There was no noise at all, as if the fog had muffled everything around in cotton. I took six slow steps forward into a gently yielding silver blankness that sifted through me as I walked. Then my foot struck a curb I could only barely see. I stepped up onto the next section of sidewalk. Some unguessable distance ahead of me, the next street lamp burned a circle of dim yellow the size of a tennis ball through the silver. Whatever I had crossed, it wasn't Berlin Avenue.
Three feet away, the green metal stalk of a street sign shone out of the fog. I went toward the sign and looked up. The green pole ascended straight up into thick cloud, like a skyscraper. I couldn't even see the signs, much less read the names stamped on them. I got right beside the pole and tilted back my head. Far up in a silver mass that seemed to shift sideways as I looked into it, a darker section of fog vaguely suggested a rectangle. Above that the shining silver fog appeared to coalesce and solidify, like a roof.
There must have been four blocks, not three, between John's house and Berlin Avenue. All I had to do was follow the lamps and keep counting. I began walking toward the glow of the lamp, and when I drew level with it, I said five to myself. As soon as I walked past the lamp, the world disappeared again into soft bright silvery emptiness. Berlin Avenue had to be directly ahead of me, and I moved along confidently until the dime-sized glow of yet another street lamp reached me through the fog from somewhere far ahead. Then I reached another intersection with a rounded curb down into a gray-white roadbed. Ely Place had stretched itself off into a dimensionless infinity.
But as long as I kept counting the street lamps, I was secure—the street lamps were my version of Ariadne's thread; they would lead me back to John's house. I stepped down into the narrow road and walked across.
Mystified, I walked another two blocks and passed three more lamps without hearing a car or seeing another human being. At the beginning of the next block, the ninth street lamp glowing just ahead of me, I realized what must have happened—I had turned the wrong way when I left John's house and was now far east of Berlin Avenue, nearing the Sevens and Eastern Shore Drive. The invisible houses around me had grown larger and grander, the lawns had become longer and more immaculate. In a few blocks, I would be across the street from the big bluffs falling away to the lakeshore.
Another block went by in a chilly silver emptiness, and then another. I had counted eleven lamps. If I had turned east instead of west on Ely Place, I was very nearly at Eastern Shore Road. Ahead of me lay another block and another dim circle of yellow light.
Two thoughts came to me virtually simultaneously: this street was never going to lead me either to Berlin Avenue or to Eastern Shore Road, and if John Ransom and I were going to break into Bob Bandolier's old house, this was the day to do it. I even thought there was an excellent reason for taking a look inside the Bandolier house. I'd dismissed John's statement that Fee was keeping something in the house by telling him yes, he kept his childhood there: now I thought that probably his adulthood—the records of his secret life—would be in the house, too. Where else could he have taken the boxes from the Green Woman? Elvee Holdings couldn't own property all over town. It was so obvious that I didn't see why I hadn't thought of it before.
Now all I had to do was to count off eleven street lamps and wait for John to get out of bed. I turned around and started moving back through the bright vacancy.
