The Night Swimmers

by Peter Rock

  It’s been over ten years since I had a machine with a disk drive that could read that diskette. But I took it to the technology people at the college where I teach, and they unlocked it. Even though some files were damaged, and even if I had been writing with a word processor that no longer exists, they accessed this artifact:

  February 11, 1995

  Hello, hello,

  I just realized that I don’t think I’ve ever said your name to you, that there isn’t a name that I call you. I can’t remember if I ever heard you say my name. That’s okay.

  You can tell by the postmark that I am back in Utah. Where are you? I’ll send this to Ephraim and hopefully they’ll forward it.

  I stayed there until November, only.

  I am living here in a two-room adobe house with a bathtub and toilet in my bedroom, behind a screen. The postmistress told me that the house has two front doors because it was built for the wives of a polygamist. The threshold between the rooms is pock-marked and rounded by sheep’s hooves because the house was used to shelter sheep for twenty years, before a friend of mine’s mother fixed it up. I have a barn and a pasture and at the edge of the pasture are bare trees. In one of them is a huge tangle of sticks, an eagle’s nest, though I haven’t seen the eagles. Not yet.

  The other day, I looked across the pasture and saw a woman in a bonnet, in the driveway of a distant house, climbing into a pickup truck.

  How are you? I am fine. I miss you, I think it’s all right to say that. Days go by, here, where I don’t talk to anyone, don’t say a word. There’s only one grocery store, no swimming pool. I miss swimming.

  My only friend here is a big black dog that must belong to a neighbor. This dog chases the snowplows, up and down the street, the white waves they make. He has one crooked foreleg, so maybe he caught a plow, once. He watches me writing, here, his face at the window and his breath steaming it up. He’s a very quiet dog. He never barks. If it’s a really cold night, I let him inside.

  I wish we were swimming. There are things now I want to ask you that I didn’t (couldn’t). I wonder what you are doing. Sometimes I think about what if I were in Mr. Zahn’s house right now, up in Wisconsin in the winter, the way you asked me to. Would you have come and visited me? I don’t know.

  The other day I walked to the grocery store and the woman at the deli counter asked me about my dog. I turned around and there he was: silent, watching me, sitting in the aisle. The lady asked me if he was a seeing eye dog and I told her he wasn’t even mine. But I got him out of the store, brought him back here to our street, wherever he belongs.

  I thought you’d drowned. I was trying to stay close to you. I wish you could tell me more about what happened.

  There’s no one here. At the grocery store, all the shopping carts are frozen together. But the adobe walls of this house are so thick that they hold the heat for days, even after the fire is out.

  Here I forget what time it is. I lose pens, pencils, books, scissors. The woman who owns the house told me that a ghost lives here, and that the ghost is a little girl. I hope that this is true. The other night I woke up and it felt like someone had just touched the skin of my face and no one else was here.

  The letter tapers off; it appears to be unfinished. Did I write more and, lacking bravery, delete some of it? Did I print it out and mail it?

  - 27 -

  In my files of potential story material from back then, there’s a lot of information about the “psychic photographer” Ted Serios, a topic that has led me, over the last thirty years, to write many unsuccessful and abandoned stories. Serios possessed the ability of pointing a Polaroid camera at his own head and producing photographs of places he had never been or seen. He called these photos “thoughtographs,” and claimed that his psychic abilities began around 1953 or 1954, when he allowed himself to be hypnotized by George Johannes, a fellow bellhop at Chicago’s Conrad Hilton Hotel. “Mr. Serios is desirous of putting himself at the disposal of science,” states an article in Fate magazine, “But he would like to get beyond the stage of perpetual demonstration and into more fruitful phases of investigation.”

  Ted Serios was noted by researchers for his sincerity; forty years old, he looked sixty (“Mr. Serios is a friendly, unassuming man . . . At least part of his health problem is in consequence of the strain of his mediumship and the isolation it has created through misunderstandings and skepticism”); he was a drinker, and one book I read mentioned, in passing, that he had been beaten up by someone wielding a two-by-four. When he took his thoughtographs he would typically get quite drunk; he would shout and wail and screw up his features. Some suspected these to be the classic tricks of a magician, distracting the audience, and many believed and believe that Serios was perpetrating a hoax. Still, he was never caught out, and he used a Polaroid camera, which removed the darkroom from the equation—the instantaneity made it more believable and immediate. “Present knowledge of the laws governing the physical universe,” unnamed scientists concluded, “cannot explain this phenomenon.”

  The demonstrations of this phenomenon took place mostly in Chicago, in rooms without windows. Once, Serios promised a picture of a dinosaur in its natural habitat, only to generate an image of a giraffe on display in the Chicago Natural History Museum (“It will have been noted that Mr. Serios seldom knows in advance what is going to come out of the camera and that when he thinks he does he is often wrong”). He stared “fixedly” into the lens; sometimes the images would be all black, sometimes pure white. Buildings, airplanes. Often two figures, walking across a field or standing next to a body of water.

  Serios’s photographs, his thoughtographs—their blurred beauty suggests that something is being discovered, a haziness that belies an effort to turn the invisible visible. (Wittgenstein: “People often use tinted lenses in their eye-glasses in order to see clearly, but never cloudy lenses.”) I press my face into these fuzzy images in exactly the same way as I once did with the photographs of Bigfoot, of the Loch Ness Monster.

  Experts said that the images of hotels were “often taken from angles and vantage points such as they could only have been taken from a helicopter.” These are blurry pictures of tilting hotels, of columns and doorways, of women walking. Many images came out dark, shadowy, then in subsequent shots the shadows would coalesce into recognizable forms, as if surfacing from deep water. Sometimes the images would be of Serios’s face, peering intently into the camera.

  - 28 -

  By myself in Mount Pleasant, I watched the windows, waited for the eagles. Once, during a storm, I stood in the rain and watched that nest blown apart, long sticks like spears falling around me. I looked out the window and thought: If the next three cars that pass the house are blue or white, I will receive a letter today. I decided: If a bird flies higher than the barn in the next thirty seconds, there’s really someone wonderful for me out there.

  My relationships had always devolved into silence and inertia and then I moved somewhere else, began a new relationship, stayed as long as there was still the faintest momentum from the beginning, that excitement of the unknown. My stories worked this way, too. Plenty of abrupt endings, doors slamming, trucks on highways. I was afraid to be still, to stay in a room with another person. I had no clue what people might say to each other, past a certain point.

  In his book Audition, Michael Shurtleff writes, “I then ask, ‘Why don’t you run? What keeps you there?’ The answer to these questions is what makes the actor able to function properly in the scene.”

  I could never answer those questions. I was continually searching for a scene in which I’d be able to function properly, rather than finding or recognizing or creating the reasons to stay.

  Once, only a few years before Mount Pleasant, I’d lived with my girlfriend in Montana, in our little house with the pink kitchen; we had made our first attempt to live like adults, like people who wrote things. We built bookshelves, integrated ou
r books. I made her a treasure hunt, for Valentine’s Day, that led her through those books—a passage from Shelley on a scrap of paper led to A Defense of Poetry, inside of which was another scrap, from a quotation from Alice Munro; inside Munro, a note that led to Rilke, from Rilke to Wordsworth, Wordsworth to Flannery O’Connor.

  One day soon after she moved west to be with me, she bought new running shoes and said she was going jogging; that surprised me, as she’d never been a particularly athletic person, and I also felt hurt, somehow, that she would rather run out into the frozen day than stay inside with me, where it was warm. I watched her lace her laces, then head out, awkward and ungainly, her sharp elbows jutting back and forth, her shoes so big, a brighter white than the snow.

  She disappeared around the corner, leaving me behind, alone, and I wandered through our few rooms, looking at her things. Wedged between a dictionary and a one-volume encyclopedia, I found a spiral notebook that seemed to be her journal. I opened it, read a page, then slapped it shut, thrilled and ashamed of myself. She had written a list there, a series of self-recriminations.

  A tendency to put on weight.

  A need for always one more kiss than I’m given, another moment of affection.

  What did I feel, reading that list? A kind of grim reassurance, I admit, that was not exactly sympathy and didn’t change my behavior. I took it in as secret information I could hold and use, rather than conversations we could have.

  - 29 -

  Later that spring of 1995, I packed up my things and drove east in my blue pickup truck—out I-80 toward and through Rock Springs, then jogging up toward Casper, onto I-90, into South Dakota. These were names, places, highways I knew from driving back and forth with my family each summer, in our various station wagons, toward Wisconsin. I had never driven it alone.

  I stopped only to buy gas or to piss on the shoulder of the highway—the truck still running, the door open, the light in the cab glowing out against nothing and the music blaring, slipping into the darkness. There was almost no one out there on those highways. I had to keep the music turned up loud, to stay awake, to keep my momentum.

  I fumbled with cassette tapes, squinting to read the labels on the stickers; as I drove, I listened to Tom Waits sing, “Choppity-chop goes the ax in the woods, you gotta meet me by the fall-down tree”; I imagined this as a kind of soundtrack to what I was doing, some kind of film where my truck sped along the desolate highway and the camera zoomed in, gradually, closer and closer to me, the music growing louder until it was as loud as it was in the cab of my truck, where I would be staring out through the windshield with a resolute expression on my face.

  I drank coffee, ate licorice, turned the song up louder. Sioux Falls and on into Minnesota. Rochester, La Crosse. I whispered along to the words of the song, and actually it wasn’t that song at all, that can’t be right—that album came out in 1999, years later. I was actually listening to “When the moon is a cold-chiseled dagger, sharp enough to draw blood from a stone” or “Someone’s crying in the woods, someone’s burying all his clothes. Roadkill has its seasons, just like anything. It’s possums in the autumn, and it’s farm cats in the spring.”

  The faint lights of towns, of cities—I imagined that children slept in those houses, and in their rooms, inside their warm beds as I passed, perhaps caught up in their dreams. There was no roadkill, there was nothing.

  A thing, a fact that I was not thinking about, or trying not to be aware of, was that I had driven this highway, this route, less than three years before, and then I had not been alone. It was in the same truck, pulling a U-Haul trailer, and I was with my Canadian girlfriend. We had been leaving Montana and heading to New York, so she could begin graduate school. We would see what the future held for or would bring us, what quietly destructive things we would do to each other.

  A month ago, a year after she’d first mentioned the letters to me, this girlfriend sent me an email; she told me she’d returned to Toronto, found the letters I’d written in our past, and mailed them to me. When I reminded her that I’d asked her not to send them, she told me that I could read or not read them, that I could copy them, but that she wanted me to return them to her.

  Weeks passed, and the letters had not arrived. I wrote her back, asked if she’d sent them to me at home or at work. It turned out that she’d sent them to a house that my wife and I had sold years before; I don’t even know where she’d found that address.

  That house is only a couple miles from where we live now, so I got on my bike and rode over there.

  My wife and I had been so happy in that house; it was the first house we owned, and we (mostly she) did so much work on it—the Murphy bed, the bathrooms, all that smooth linoleum. Since we moved out, we’d driven past on occasion, noting our curtains still in the windows, alarmed as the untended yard became overgrown.

  And yet I had not been so close to it as that day a few weeks ago when I lay my bike down in the driveway, climbed the stairs onto the front porch that we’d had rebuilt. It was all so broken-down! Dish towels covering the windows, cracked paint, the stove dislodged from the kitchen, now on the front porch—I reached out and touched its chipped, white paint; in four years, I’d cooked so many meals, thousands of cups of coffee, on those burners.

  It seemed somehow fitting that letters I’d written twenty years ago were sent to a place where I’d lived ten years before—not quite reaching me, only getting halfway back through time. Standing on the porch of that ruined house, so bleak, I felt that my wife and I had escaped another, bleaker destiny by moving away.

  The letters were not there. No one would answer the door. I left a plaintive note, explaining who and where I was; I waylaid a postman; I even went to the station. Even my sister-in-law, Maggie, who knew a neighbor, got involved. I had wanted those letters, once, and then I had asked that they not be sent, and now I felt slightly bereft, responsible for their loss.

  And then my wife and daughters and I flew to Utah for a week, to see my parents. While there, we visited the Homestead Crater, a mineral cone high in the mountains. Floating on our backs, in that warm water, we could see the blue sky through the round mouth of the cone, fifty feet above. Clouds drifted past. Voices echoed and came apart, dissipating up through that hole. My daughters were most excited by the dark figures of scuba divers, fifty feet below us. These bent, distended shapes rose, slowly taking the form of human bodies. As they surfaced, my girls swarmed close, delighted, shouting questions.

  Yesterday, returned home from Utah, I was helping my daughters unpack from the trip when I glanced up, saw a movement through the beveled glass of our front door. I crossed the room, opened the door, and there was a package, sitting on the front porch. I heard a car’s engine start on the street, someone driving away.

  It was the lost package of letters. Torn at one end, furtively returned. I picked them up, brought them inside.

  These letters were written in the last years before email—they were so physical. And there were other artifacts, too: photographs, and handwritten notes, and ID cards, all bound together.

  Feeding the letters into a scanner days later, I read the postmarks, the times and places, the changing addresses; I imagined her opening each envelope, unfolding the pages covered with my handwriting.

  - 30 -

  [Autumn, 1990: Note written in Cross Campus Library]

  [Excerpted letters, sent from Montana to New Haven, 1991]

  January 27

  And I want you to see my little shack, my stove, where I’m sitting while I write this, how you can sit in the outhouse with the door open and look at the cows. You’ll really know you’re here when you feel the cold seat of the outhouse.

  February 4

  When you said you didn’t think you’d see me again it wasn’t just a terrible thing to say, it was wrong. Been thinking about that time in the motel when I was on the phone with Byron and you were out o
f the shower, walking around nude. I’d do it again. Maybe a little differently. I want to do everyday things with you.

  February 14

  I’m starting to get a better idea about how I want to write—if I can get there, I don’t know. Sometimes when it’s late and cold I piss out the window.

  April 17

  I’m glad you’re better to me than you are in my dreams! You hurt me all the time, but its ok. Just a little note to send you this lamb’s tail. It fell off yesterday. How are things there?

  April 19

  You’re sadly mistaken if you think I don’t have trouble falling asleep; I was up half the night talking into my recorder, speaking what turns out this morning to be gibberish or another language.

  April 21

  I’ll never tire of your scratchy letters. Come west, come west. Today I saw a strange, intriguing thing: all these heifers, running in a herd, chasing a jackrabbit across the pasture. It escaped through a fence.

  April 26

  It’s surprising that the lamb’s tail smelled—something must have happened to it.

  This was the beginning of the relationship I was spinning out of, in that summer of 1994, when I met Mrs. Abel. Reading these letters, I try to understand this person, to become again the young man moving toward, preparing for mysteries he could not foresee. Encountering my voice from 1991, I feel a similar sense of the uncanny as I did that day in the Red Cabin. No person has ever felt more familiar and simultaneously so foreign.