The (Other) You

by Joyce Carol Oates

  So disguised, if they dared to venture out in day-light it was not surprising that people who knew them did not (seem to) recognize them. That people who knew them, or had once known them, might glance toward them without seeming to see them, as if, singly or together, they had become invisible.

  Not surprising, no one to blame, if friends/acquaintances/neighbors did not smile bravely at the couple—Why, hello! How are you! We have been thinking about you and meant to call . . .

  Solace came only with darkness. When dusk yielded to the sweet oblivion of night.

  * * *

  Whatever it was that had happened, however it had happened, in the bedroom at the top of the stairs in the late winter of the year, had happened at night.

  Happened was how they spoke of it. Passive, past-tense.

  Like rain, hail, dripping eaves. Earthquake. Act of God.

  Yet, what had happened in the night was discovered only in the morning—“Just after seven A.M. We are an early-rising family.”

  By which time it would be calculated that what had happened, that could not ever be reversed or undone, had happened approximately eight–nine hours before. Which was to say, between ten P.M. and eleven P.M. of the previous calendar day.

  Through the (long) night unguessed-at by the adults of the household.

  A rude surprise, at breakfast. The earthquake, at breakfast.

  The wife had been the one to make the discovery. Of course, it would be the wife. For it was nearing seven-thirty A.M. and there’d been no sound, no footsteps overhead or on the stairs. The wife, who’d called upstairs. The wife, who’d then gone upstairs to see.

  “Breakfast-time was always our happiest time . . .”

  Never again breakfast, not even the possibility of breakfast, the very word breakfast an obscenity not to be muttered aloud.

  In fact any meal contemplated during day-light was likely to provoke nausea, breathlessness, choking. Loss of appetite came to be associated with day-light—the very smell of food repulsive.

  Day-light itself repulsive. Treacherous.

  The only solace came to be sleeping through day-light and only after dark rousing themselves sleep-engorged and bloated like ticks that have feasted on blood not always knowing where they were, or when it was, or who the other was; for the consumption of alcohol (in her case, white wine; in his, whiskey) as well as barbiturates (“sleep aids”) had become the primary means of self-medication.

  Waking to find themselves in the room quaintly, comically, cruelly designated “master bedroom” of a size and dignity (bathroom adjoined) to set it apart from other, smaller, mere bedrooms in the house of which there were several including the room at the top of the stairs which was no longer used as a “bedroom” nor even as a “room.” Waking groggily, reluctantly in the (master) bedroom that soon began to exude the smells of a sickroom though neither the husband nor the wife was (they would have insisted) sick. A double bed rarely changed now, that had been routinely, even religiously changed each Monday, with fresh-laundered fine-spun cotton sheets in (matching) colors and prints, and (matching) pillowcases. And a quilted green-satin comforter atop the bed now soiled, mysteriously grimy as if with food-, blood-, vomit-stains, seen now solely by lamplight which is a forgiving sort of light unlike the raw unsparing light of day. Bedclothes dampened from sweaty dreams, sheets twisted by twitching legs, pillowcases grown sodden beneath heads leaking shame and anxiety like mucus. Underfoot in the perpetual twilight were miscellaneous socks, T-shirts, underwear—his; though similarly worn, soiled, hers were never tossed onto the floor with that cavalier air (the wife thought, observing her husband covertly) of mockery, derision.

  Her soiled things were hidden away in a hamper in the bathroom, in a proper reflex of shame. Her towels, though chronically damp, dirtied, beginning to fray, were yet hung properly on towel-racks in the bathroom, while his were likely to have fallen to the floor in a heap and this heap kicked into a corner of the bathroom.

  Like a (small, sodden) body it was. Roadkill, possibly. Tossed to the side of the road.

  Yet, the husband was correct in such deportment. What did cleanliness, propriety, even a pretense of cleanliness and propriety, matter?

  If the wife should pick up the husband’s tossed-down laundry, holding her breath reaching beneath the bed to retrieve a dirt-stiffened sock, if she should take up the moldering towels in a heap in the bathroom, would such good-wife self-abasement matter?

  Of course, it would not.

  * * *

  What mattered was sleeping through the day. Not so very easy, to sleep through an entire day.

  Especially in hideous light-filled months: April, May. Pinnacle of day-light horror: June 21.

  What had happened in the room at the top of the stairs in the season of melting snow, dripping eaves, thunderous skies had seemed at the least to be fixed, permanent. There is that—the wife might say with a bitter sort of joy. For here was a promise of finality, the worst that might happen, that had happened, had the power, or should have had the power, to stop time. Yet—time had not stopped.

  Not in the slightest had time stopped. What a joke, to imagine that there was an entity—Time—that might choose to stop.

  Instead late, wintry March yielded by degrees to a warmer season. Befouled snow, dripping icicles at last—disappeared. Hard-frozen earth thawed, miniature shoots began to appear, the wife stared in disbelief at—what could these be?—a scattering of snowdrops vivid-whitely blooming amid the debris of winter beside the rear door of the garage . . . As the brain-damaged are not likely to comprehend the blow of the sledgehammer that has damaged their brains so the wife and the husband could not comprehend this stunning betrayal—a new season?

  Where in a late winter of occluded skies a stuporous kind of dark-muck sleep was possible, this sleep became, even with self-medication, ever more elusive in a season of obscenely bright skies. Eight hours of sleep was a challenge. Nine, ten hours a fantasy-wish. Eleven hours, a triumph rarely achieved.

  By mutual consent, neither chose to swallow a half-dozen chunky white barbiturates, or more. Neither chose to obliterate obscene consciousness altogether. No words, no speech, instinctively they shrank from such a remedy for the pain of nightgrief.

  Someone has to remember. If there is no one . . .

  Waking too soon, the heart pounded in dismay, disgust. If the light of late afternoon was still discernible through minute cracks in the venetian blinds.

  Tightly the blinds were drawn to prevent light leaking in. Tightly in all the windows of the house, not just in the (master) bedroom. A savage tightness as the husband readjusted the blinds to draw them tighter. The wife whimpered as if the husband were drawing something tight, tighter around her neck—but to no avail, the husband did not hear. Day-light was the enemy, the husband would defeat. Slats in the blinds broke and had to be mended with duct tape.

  A kind of radioactive light was indeed leaking into the house, an obvious poison. The wife began to wear the oversized dark-dark glasses in the house, during the (obscene) hours of the day when sleep failed her and cast her out forlorn as a mangled creature on a littered beach when the tide has gone out. The husband cursed at infinitesimal motes of light glimmering through blinds drawn to the windowsills and stomped from room to room nailing blankets over the windows, the darkest blankets he could find, the largest bath towels to keep out the despised light.

  Hammering!—the husband did love to hammer. (Was this love new? The pleasure of gripping the wooden handle of the claw hammer, certainly new. Having taken leave of his day-light work to sink into the more exhausting labor of nightgrief the husband had energy to spare.) The wife cringed, pressing her hands against her ears. Pain darted inside her skull like lightning. Such fury in the husband’s hammering, the wife feared he was striking at her head with the claw hammer as he pounded nails into the wall securing a blanket or a towel in place. The husband was methodical, precise. There is a particular fury in precision.

  Yes
I am the one, the one to blame. Yes you are blameless.

  Yet, one day the husband was heard, in a distant room, calling “Help! Help me!”—his voice ringing through the house like something buzzing and careening in terror, striking walls.

  The wife froze where she stood. That’s to say, where she stood the wife froze.

  That’s to say, the wife did not precisely freeze in place, though she was shivering with cold, a chronic sort of clammy-damp cold that had lodged in the marrow of her bones like an insidious leukemia; rather, the wife for a fleeting ecstatic moment contemplated the luxury of not-hearing the husband’s call for help, her excuse being that she was in a faraway room, or had turned on a faucet, or perhaps she was in the garage where day-light was not blinding. Just a moment, a precious moment of freedom, then—“Yes? What is it? Where are—” The wife hurried upstairs to a room where she discovered the husband standing on a chair barefoot, precariously balanced, gripping the claw hammer in one hand and with the other clinging to a window frame to prevent a fall, flushed face glaring and hair sharply receding from his forehead lifted in tufts of rage.

  “Help me! For Christ’s sake don’t just stand there . . .”

  Of course, the wife hurried to help the husband, steadying his tremulous legs (so thin! the muscles seemed to have atrophied) so there was less danger of falling as he resumed his task of nailing another blanket over another window; providing too a (thin, narrow) shoulder for the husband to lean heavily upon, as he stepped down from the chair.

  “Thank you! What would I do without you, darling”—a remark of such jocose grimness, the wife could imagine the words uttered through the gritted teeth of a death’s-head.

  * * *

  The (happy) surprise was, each of them was discovering how yoked together they were in the aftermath of what is (commonly, promiscuously, banally) called trauma. Unavoidable in the intimacy of marriage?—each wondered.

  “We have each other”—the wife dared to suggest, with a shiver of hope.

  “We have each other”—the husband echoed, with a shiver of dread.

  Nightgrief. No need to speak of it, as bog-creatures have no need to speak of the bog in which they dwell, companionably.

  SOON IT WAS DISCOVERED that even in the shimmering Hell-light of summer an entire (new) life was possible, after dark.

  In the (master) bedroom alone a galaxy of TV possibilities. Full range of cable channels including Spanish-speaking. Streaming films, DVDs. A new flat-screen TV seemingly floating in place, matte-black when turned off, sleek and handsome, larger than the flat-screen in the basement which they no longer watched, ever. At their fingertips on their laptop keyboards the ubiquitous Internet, “social media”—an infinity of distractions each of which demanded immediate intense attention.

  * * *

  Insomniac hours. Eyes that fail to close. Brains that fail to shut off. Here were the (home) cures.

  Meals in front of the TV replaced meals in the kitchen, dining room—rooms fraught with anxiety like bad, bog-smells. Meals delivered to the front door or defrosted in the microwave replaced meals (lovingly, tediously) prepared in the kitchen with “fresh” ingredients. (With astonishment and chagrin the wife recalled those years, that constituted at least one-third of her life. What on earth had been that charade? Had she been performing an arcane rite—mother, provider-of-food? Household good sport, mediator of disputes, never failing to smile? None of it had mattered in the slightest, as it turned out. She thought it bizarre, she hadn’t guessed.)

  Neither had much appetite any longer. Indeed, appetite had become a problematic issue. Once you’ve lost your appetite you have lost your comprehension of what appetite is, or was. (Yet, what could lost possibly mean, in this context? If lost, lost where? There can be no category of sheer lostness. And how could an instinct so rudimentary, yet so abstract, as appetite, become lost?) Yet, with or without appetite the couple discovered that the distractions of an animated screen made it possible to eat, if only mechanically, and certainly possible, in fact quite pleasurable to drink—white wine, whiskey. (The white wine wasn’t invariably chilled, and the husband who’d favored scotch whiskey over ice cubes no longer troubled much about ice, for the walk downstairs to the kitchen and back upstairs was a bore.) A pleasurable sort of hypnosis in staring at fleeting images on screens, sudden swells and crescendos of “music” to signal meaning—no need to speak though sometimes by mutual consent, though wordless, one of them hastily switched a channel with the remote, or hastily pressed mute.

  For even nightgrief must be protected. Nightgrievers cannot be too vigilant.

  Of course each tried to read, in private. Recalling that some of the most intense experiences of their lives had been in (serious) reading. Yet each was discovering that books had become problematic since what had happened in the late winter of dripping eaves, thunderous skies. Requiring concentration, conscious involvement. It was disappointing—alarming—that neither the husband nor the wife was capable any longer of reading, except for short periods of time. No sooner was a sentence read, than its meaning was lost. Gamely the wife tried to (re)read one of the favorite books of her previous life, Jane Eyre. (The very paperback, with an introduction by her English professor at Bard, she’d read and diligently annotated in college.) But the paragraphs were too long, turgid; by the time she came to the end of a paragraph she was obliged to reread it; if she was being honest, she could not allow herself to push forward but must read, reread, and (re)reread, the same numbing words. The husband found that he could not sit still long enough to read as he could recall reading in the past. He too had a cherished book to (re)read—John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, also in a paperback heavily annotated by the husband, a lifetime ago in law school in New Haven. But his skin itched violently, distracting him. His scalp itched, he scratched with his nails and drew blood. For reading involves a strict linear progression of thought, and an effort of memory; books involve pages that are meant to be turned, and pages contain lines of print that descend in a specific, immutable order, and “print” must be decoded in the brain, thus requiring a participatory sort of consciousness, the most exhausting sort of consciousness. In frustration the husband tore out pages of A Theory of Justice, crumpled them in his fist—“Fuck ‘justice.’ Fuck its guts.” In another room, the wife stiffened in fright but did not hear.

  The solace they craved was not to be found in books. True solace was a passive and narcotic activity of (semi)-consciousness that required no personal involvement—staring for hours at a glassy screen upon which images moved ceaselessly, music swelled, subsided, swelled ceaselessly whether a human consciousness was present or not.

  * * *

  Venturing out after dark was another sort of adventure, risky and thrilling (at first). Guiding yourself by the headlights of a vehicle that are aimed straight ahead and do not waver. So that even if you are forced to drive along certain (familiar, terrible) streets and roadways, you will find that the terrain has altered simply because it is night and not day-light which was the condition in which you’d most frequently experienced these (familiar, terrible) streets and roadways.

  For instance, instead of Northway Mall, a vast sinkhole they would never (again) approach, there was Southbridge Mall, a forty-minute drive along relatively unfamiliar roads. Parts of the mall remained open until midnight and so here was an oasis of festive lights, a floating island thrumming with a particular sort of after-dark suburban life: fast-food restaurants, “quality” restaurants with liquor licenses, a glittery CineMax boasting twelve theaters.

  The promise of Southbridge Mall was that it could be experienced as “new”—even brand-name stores and franchises could appear legitimately “new” in the unfamiliar setting. A multi-tiered burbling fountain at its center, architecture that differed perceptibly from the architecture of the Northway Mall (though created by the identical architectural firm)—here was a new planet to be explored cautiously, its dangers not immediately apparent until, on their t
hird visit, forced to wear tinted glasses in the fluorescent glare, thinking to see a film at the CineMax they chanced to discover on the lower mall level a row of garish fast-food restaurants adjacent to a video-game arcade swarming with teenaged boys from which, dazed and staggering, migraine-tears streaking their cheeks, they fled.

  * * *

  Weeks, months. One hundred eighty-two days, one hundred eighty-three . . .

  Without their having realized the (deadly) zenith of summer had passed. From now on days would be shorter, nights longer. From now on, the air would be easier to breathe.

  Gravity was on their side now. Gravity would ease them downward.

  A day when anything might happen. The wife might decide, for instance, to do the laundry. Run the dishwasher (crammed with plates, cutlery haphazardly rinsed). Clean the house. At least, parts of the house that were not, by mutual consent, off-limits. In the early hours of the morning, that’s to say in the blackest hours of the night, tugging the vacuum cleaner from room to room, a bracing activity, caffeine-fueled. Stray thoughts were muffled by the reassuring roar and under cover of this roar the wife repeated the statement she’d given to authorities: “We had no idea.” Clearing her throat, more calmly: “We had no idea. My husband and me . . .” Seeing with satisfaction how bits of dust and grime were sucked up into the vacuum bag. How easy housecleaning was, and how visibly dirt might vanish! That is, the sort of dirt detachable from a surface.

  Stains were another matter. Stains in carpets might be left for another time.

  The husband too might rouse himself from the TV screen that left him dazed and enervated to make minor repairs in the house with his screwdriver, pliers, claw hammer and handful of nails. One of the husband’s happiest discoveries had been his toolbox, stored out in the garage. Sometimes, not invariably, the husband wore work-gloves. On his head, pulled low on his forehead, a carpenter’s cap imprinted with white letters DUTCH BOY, he’d found in the garage. For in the aftermath of what had happened in the room at the top of the stairs, that had not been fully understood by either the husband or the wife, the house had begun to deteriorate in a sort of delayed shock as in the aftermath of an earthquake. Wall light switches failed to turn on lights, toilet tanks ran water incessantly. Dripping faucets, stuck doors. Loose tiles that had to be glued or hammered into place. Ill-fitting windows requiring caulking. Carpets infested with moth larvae, that had to be dragged out into the garage and sprayed. The husband became quickly winded having to squat, or kneel, or strain his arm and shoulder muscles, or his neck. The husband’s spine ached, from his having dragged the heavy and resistant living room carpet across a floor. (How old was the husband now? Dimly recalled his last birthday, in his previous life, might’ve been—forty-five?—forty-nine? Like the wife, whose last birthday had been her forty-first, back in January, the husband did not expect to have another birthday.) Bits of grit fell into his eyes, that were yet reddened and swollen and failed to focus correctly. His heartbeat was erratic, whether with dread or a sort of ecstatic joy that the worst had happened, and so could not (again) happen. Yet there was pleasure in such elemental tasks of repair and renovation, that could be immediately seen, and appreciated by the other occupant of the (depleted) household. Especially tasks requiring the claw hammer, that had begun to fit the husband’s hand with a mysterious elation.