“Where are you going?” I said.
“Nowhere,” she said.
“Good. Then there’s something you can help me with.”
“Jack-”
“Let’s go.”
I had her help me find the offices of the Lakota Plainsman, which we did just before they closed. I put an ad in the personals that read, “Laura K, Jack wants to see you.” I was running short of cash, so I had Jill pay for it. She complained of the headache, so I took her home after that. The stars twinkled benignly as we walked, with no moon to kick them back into supporting roles.
She said, “Did you sleep with Susan?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to.”
“I don’t think-”
“Then don’t speak.”
“Jack-”
“Shut up.”
She huddled into herself and we completed the walk in as much silence as the night would allow, with its chatter of night things and occasional automobiles. I escorted her through the door and didn’t touch her except to help her take off her coat; I am nothing if not a gentleman. Susan was not in; no doubt she was dancing or perhaps out with some friends. I went off alone. Sometimes I let my Wellingtons slap against the sidewalk, sometimes I made my footfalls silent. It was cold, colder than New York at any rate; but it was a distant cold; it didn’t really penetrate, rather it tingled against my cheeks and inside my nose. I came to a place called Terrence F. Kleffman Park. It was one neat city block, surrounded by evenly spaced oaks, with a wading pool in the middle, and a pair of baseball diamonds at the far end, identified by those peculiar tall wire fences to catch the balls the players miss. Here, said the park, you may engage in recreation during the prescribed hours. Here are the trees you may be shaded by, and these are the sports in which you may participate.
There had been a light snowfall during the day, and a little bit remained in the grass of the park, making it look like a field of toothpicks sticking up out of a sandbox filled with salt.
A police cruiser went by on the far side. They didn’t notice me, or they would certainly have sent a spotlight my way, and maybe stopped to ask questions. What could someone be doing alone in a park at night in the middle of winter? Must be something illegal. Ah, you poor fools, walking so tall and haughty with your guns and your sticks and your wide belts full of gear like the second coming of Batman, sitting in your little cars full of mechanized fear as you reach for your little radios at the first sign of anything more worrisome than a jaywalker. Shall I introduce you to Jim? How would you feel about that, you blue-jacketed clowns? But he’s nothing, of course. What about Traci, who lives less than a hundred miles from here, and, when the mood is on her, could walk through a storm of your metal-coated leadfilled man-killers, and rip your heart out and eat it in front of you before you died? Yes, drive on, drive on, looking for drunks on the road or children out past curfew. You are nothing to me.
Oh, I have no doubt Kellem means to use you to bring me to earth, but, even then, you will be no more than tools. That’s all you will ever be, faceless, nameless tools, who sell yourselves more often and more cheaply than any whore in this town.
I began to run, which I often do when frustration turns to wrath. The icy wind stroked my hair like Laura’s caress had, so long, so long ago. The pavement hurt my feet, but that didn’t slow me. My senses were filled with the mindless, meaningless life I passed; my heart was full of the need for destination, which I found, and that filled me; now I wished for a moon to light my way, for my sight had dimmed, but all of my other senses were heightened. I wanted to laugh, but in my range it was another sound that emerged, but no one heard it anyway, or ever would, for silence inhabits the minds of the deaf, and mine is the power over those who will not hear.
Shadows slowly lengthen as evening turns to cold; The fruits of my labor lie dormant in the hold. An empty hand awaits a glove another day survived, Nightmares fall like poetry, carefully contrived. The leaves blow ’round in circles where before the sun was hot, Add a pinch of desperation to what’s boiling in the pot. The circle widens now, with every blinded turn and twist, To tell of wind and thunder, ice and rain and mist. Close your coat against the wind, tight around your neck; It’s bitter here without the sun, but what did you expect? Words flow by like melody; watch as they unfold, And hear the shadows lengthen as evening turns to cold.
For the first time in more years than I care to remember, I’ve written a poem. I must have spent four or five hours revising it, then typed it out all nice and neat, and I still don’t really like it; it seems like one of those regular, choppy efforts made by first-year students of English literature; but it is interesting that I felt like attempting poetry at all. I think it is this house that is bringing out that side of me. I stopped by to see Jill again today, but she wasn’t in, and neither was Susan. I have nothing to say, but sitting here is better than anything else I can think of to do. Maybe I’ll go back to Jill’s place again and wait around until she comes home. Or I
Jim has just come in and suggested we build a fire. We haven’t had one in several days, and perhaps that is the better idea. I shall sit in front of the fire and ask Jim to tell me of the house; who has lived here and why they left. If he is not in a mood to talk, I shall stare into the flames the way he does, and maybe I’ll begin to learn what he is seeing in the dancing lights.
It has reached the point where I become annoyed when, like yesterday, I can’t get to the typing machine. Odd how much this annoys me. Didn’t Horatio say something on the subject? Or was it Hamlet? My education seems to be gradually slipping away. This saddens me. I was once a very good student, I think. I had a good attitude, which, I believe, means that one looks on learning as a game; or rather, a series of games, such as: What can I invent as a device to remember the year the War of the Roses ended? Or, how can I use my studies of German philosophy to help with a paper on natural science?
Now that I think of it, I cannot remember when the War of the Roses ended, and the little I remember of German philosophy is that a few of us once wrote a poem about an imaginary duel between Feuerbach and Hegel, which the latter eventually won by putting the former to sleep and then drowning him in a twenty-page sentence. It sounds more clever than it probably was, but we were pleased with it at the time, although we never dared to show it to our professors.
Nevertheless, I think I was a good student. I have, at any rate, retained a strong desire to learn, and a tendency to question things around me. I’ve been told that age brings acceptance and complacency, and I’ve even seen examples of this, but it seems not to be true in my case.
Age does, however, bring about an annoying softening of the hard edges of memory; there are now many things of which I no longer remember the details, only how those details affected me. I remember a Latin professor named Smythe, and I have the feeling that he was a devoutly religious man, yet kind and well disposed toward me, but I can no longer remember what he looked like, nor any of the things he actually did. This annoys me.
As I said, I was not able to use the typewriting machine yesterday, because the house was invaded just as I was about to come up to my sanctum. It was not a serious, nor even frightening invasion; there were three boys, aged about ten or eleven, who, from what little I picked up of their conversation, had been dared or had dared each other to spend a night in the haunted house.
I kept urging Jim to make himself visible to them, or let me rattle some woodwork or something, but he wouldn’t. We sat in the basement with the dust and the spiders and occasionally went up to see if they were still there.
“You like children, don’t you?” I said.
“Used to be one,” said Jim.
“Would you have spent a night in a haunted house?”
“No, sir, not for anything.”
“I think I might have, if we’d had one around.”
“I would have thought that haunted houses were everywhere.”
“Not as such. We knew ghosts appeared, here and there, but mostly in places we couldn’t get to. And there were always a few spirits of one sort or another in everyone’s house, or at least we thought there were, but I don’t remember anyone ever leaving a house because there was a spirit there. Then, in England-”
“When did you go to England?”
