The Night Swimmers

by Peter Rock

  Back in the main room, I dragged the bean bag chair to one side. I lifted one end of the mattress, as if that would help me. The lights were on; anyone outside could see me, whatever I was doing. Looking behind everything, under everything, lifting piles of paper and setting them down again.

  It was then that I saw the lions. Up high, on the ends of the wooden beams that ran across the ceiling: two carved wooden lion heads, just the same as those on the table Mrs. Abel had taken. Quickly, I lifted the rickety canvas chair and set it under the ceiling beams. I climbed up, balancing, teetering, to see if the lions would somehow open.

  At first, nothing, then I squeezed harder on the sides of the lion’s jaws and it came off in my hand, revealing a space, a compartment, there. When I squinted, I could see a small handprint, pressed into the plaster. That was all.

  I replaced the lion’s head, leapt down, dragged the chair to the other side, almost tipped over as I reached upward. This one seemed stuck; at first it wouldn’t move, but then all at once it did, and something flashed white, out at me—a bird? I flinched, closed my yes; when I opened them, it took a moment to find it, to see the yellowed paper, curled in a roll.

  I leapt down, picked it up from the floor, opened it just enough to see writing, print from a typewriter. I didn’t read it, not right there, but I somehow knew that this was it, what I’d been seeking. Carefully, I set the paper on the sill, then climbed back out the window, as if the house had no doors. I turned to close the window, and the paper was gone; I leaned my head back through the window—nothing on the floor—then stepped back. There, rolled out onto the ice, settled alongside the house. Tenderly, I snatched up the paper, rushed across the yard, back to the safety of the Anne Marie. Inside, holding the paper up in the moonlight, I began to read:

  The bottom edge of the paper was torn away, right in the middle of that sentence.

  - 34 -

  Intrigued, frustrated, I wrote Mrs. Abel one last letter and delivered it to the post office, where it could wait for her, along with the others. It was a short letter, almost entirely questions; I wrote it at the table in the Red Cabin, then walked out under the trees, climbed onto my bicycle, and coasted down the hill into town with all those questions buzzing in me:

  Is the girl in the story you?

  How much more of it is there, or is that all?

  Did you write it, or did someone else?

  And why did you give it to me?

  Where are you?

  - 35 -

  I read that fragment about the girl and the old man so many times that summer—alone in the Red Cabin, I’d furtively get it out, afraid that someone might interrupt me, ask me what I was reading or where I’d found it—that I almost memorized it.

  I still have that scrap of paper, taped into a notebook with the piece of birch bark, the picture of the cabin and the fire in the forest. When I reread the story, now, it seems possible that it has nothing to do with Mrs. Abel, that she didn’t put it there at all. Perhaps Mr. Zahn himself wrote it, hid it there when he built the house, a riddle for a child or grandchild to find.

  When I reread the story now, I get caught up on one line:

  There were reports, after the young girl’s arrival, that at night forest animals would call out in human voices.

  Perhaps this is because I’m in the process of reading The Chronicles of Narnia to my daughters, before they go to bed at night, sending them to sleep with all these tales of Talking Animals.

  What I find most fascinating and disturbing are the accounts of Wild Animals that become Talking Animals, then relapse, or those awkward moments where it’s unclear whether animals encountered are one or the other. For instance, on the last page of The Horse and His Boy, the mention of the “Lapsed Bear of Stormness, which was really a Talking Bear but had gone back to Wild Bear habits” before it was beaten so severely that it “couldn’t see out of its eyes and become a reformed character.”

  The most troubling passage in these books happens in Prince Caspian, in a world where it’s believed that Talking Animals are only a myth, when in fact they were nearly exterminated by the Telmarines, and are in hiding. Once Caspian has escaped his uncle and is on the run with the Pevensie children, they come across Talking Animals and travel with them through a wilderness where “wild, witless and dumb” animals also roam. Among the latter is a bear that they kill and eat, its flesh wrapped around apples and roasted over a fire. It’s a complicated situation, this uncertainty, as they encounter new animals—difficult to know whether each new one is a friend, prepared to have a conversation, or a wild, witless and dumb beast, prepared to eat them or to be eaten.

  Here’s a conversation that the Pevensie sisters, Lucy and Susan, have, while that bear is being butchered by the boys:

  “Wouldn’t it be dreadful,” Lucy said, “if some day, in our world, at home, men started going wild inside, like the animals here, and still looked like men, so that you’d never know which were which?”

  “We’ve got enough to bother about here and now in Narnia,” says practical Susan, “without imagining things like that.”

  When I was a boy in Salt Lake City, my father read to me about the Talking Animals in Narnia, the talking rabbits of Watership Down. Hazel and Fiver, Bigwig and Buckthorn. At the end of a chapter, my father would stand, turn out the lights, and go out the door, closing it behind him. I’d listen to his footsteps, climbing the stairs; in that suddenly dark room I moved my feet to the warm spot on the mattress where he’d been sitting.

  I spent a lot of time, back then, behind our garage, talking to my rabbit, Mercury. I believed that he would talk to me if I could only convince him to trust me; he would tell me secrets that no human could know.

  At the same time, now, as I’m reading The Chronicles of Narnia to my daughters I am also reading Freud’s “The Uncanny,” a favorite from twenty years ago, a piece of writing that I still admire and find provocative. The passage that besets me concerns wax dummies and mechanical dolls, automatons; it also discusses how epileptic fits might suggest to one who witnesses them that there is something mechanized within the sufferer. This creates suspense, an uncertainty about whether a figure is a human being or not.

  I think of what the excellent Mr. Beaver says, in that first book of Narnia: “But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that’s going to be human and isn’t yet, or used to be human once and isn’t now, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.”

  Perhaps the most impossible insight might be to recognize that another person (or oneself) is actually a human being, or is becoming one. And then truly understanding and being certain of it—to set down your hatchet and summon the courage to pursue this belief, to investigate how that will be.

  - 36 -

  While I waited for my tank to be readied, I listened to a gray-haired adept, behind me, tell a woman about a pizza entrepreneur in Kauai who had spent thirty days in complete darkness and silence, not speaking a word.

  Books were for sale, in the waiting area; among them, How to Get High Without Drugs, alongside a spectrum of different colored sunglasses, for harvesting the healing powers of different wavelengths (Red denotes a strong sexuality; Yellow generates positive and optimistic qualities; Indigo combines reason with intuition, discipline with creativity) and a “True Mirror” that reflected my image without reversing it, allowing me to finally see myself as others saw me. Did I seem friendlier, more authentic and empathetic, as the sign promised? I wasn’t certain.

  This was my first time, floating in an isolation tank. I’d come in hopes of being transported to the past, of experiencing a “very strange brain event” like the one my old girlfriend had described. Perhaps I would encounter her, or even Mrs. Abel, again.

  The bearded young men who worked at this place spoke in soft, calm voices. One led me down a hallway, past doors with signs on them reading float in progress and to my room; he
explained how to proceed, then left me to disrobe, shower, enter the water and turn out the light.

  I breathed, floating on my back in that darkness, that thick salty water that held me, that crept in to fill and seal my ears. I listened to my breathing, the organs settling in my body. Was that an engine, a car out on the street? Was it still sunny out there, bright? I could not see my hands, next to my head; I could hear them bend, straighten, feel the tremble of the water, and that blackness was almost the same as swimming in the lake at night, when I also could not see my hands but only heard them, their splash and slap and my inhale, the rush of wind and night water.

  Silence.

  I am suspended. It is clear that I have turned, that I am now hanging over an abyss, a void, looking down into it, levitating. I feel the feathers of my lungs, the twist of my intestines. My heartbeat—I almost fall asleep and my leg twitches, my arm twitches, gently the waves wrinkle and settle around me as I hang like this. My heartbeat, and when I squinch up my eye against an itch I hear the sound of my brain flexing, winding, I feel the synapses crackling, chains and chains and chains that I move incrementally through and I am gaining momentum suddenly traveling very close to the ground, the white beach that I know, every stone, I have no body and I move down low, like the ghost of an animal, a bird, across the green grass of the Reeves’ lawn, under the weeping willow, out into the woods, beneath the cedars, the ground orange and green and brown.

  But I am not staying in Wisconsin, not traveling to that summer.

  I know where I am now, by the light. I am in the time between that summer of Mrs. Abel and now. A woman rises from the bed and crosses the room—strong, her body so balanced and poised, no concern for being watched, no self-consciousness. Her hair is long and dark, a snarl across her shoulders; she tucks it back and I see the side of her face. This is San Francisco, 1996, and the walls are all white. Light carpet, a mirror that doubles her now, showing the other side of her body. A white shelf, a black CD boom box; I can even read the titles of her few CDs: Neil Young, Harvest Moon; Cowboy Junkies, Lay It Down.

  This woman is not yet my wife as she gets out of bed and crosses the room, stretching one bare arm, balancing on one foot. She pulls on the cord and the blind rises up, the whiteness of the fog cast in over her skin. She turns, smiling at me, and steps back toward the bed. In that glowing whiteness, there is no sound at all.

  Five

  —

  - 37 -

  A few years ago, I was writing a novel about a girl who grew up in the woods. Hidden, resourceful, she was eventually captured. People tried to help her become integrated into our world.

  My novel arose out of actual events, something that happened not far from where I live. In the true story, the girl disappeared and never surfaced again; this bothered me so much that I decided to hypothesize about what had happened.

  I came to realize that this girl would have to tell her own story, to convey her peculiar wonderment. I have never lived in the wilderness, never been a young girl, and yet I had to figure out ways to inhabit her, to find her voice inside my voice. I did simple things, like take semi-colons away from myself; I looked at the fragments of the actual story for clues, doorways through which I might enter.

  After the girl’s capture—in the actual story, and in the made-up story, both—psychologists administered the Thematic Apperception Test to her. This is a test in which the “procedure is that of merely presenting a series of pictures to a subject and encouraging him to tell stories about them, invented on the spur of the moment . . . As a rule, the subject leaves the test happily unaware that he has presented the psychologists with what amounts to an x-ray picture of his inner self.”

  I acquired a copy of the Thematic Apperception Test, a blue box (printed upon it: This test is sold on the understanding that the plats are not to be displayed and may be purchased only by authorized persons) filled with thirty-one pictures that range from a man climbing a rope to a child in a doorway to a woman on a bridge with the sun’s rays cutting down all around her.

  Using this test, an unauthorized person, I tried to make up stories as this captured girl might. As a way to get to know her, to reveal her character, to become her. The image that taught me most was a picture of a small cabin beset by a winter storm; in the Test’s appendix it is described as “a weird picture of cloud formations overhanging a snow-covered cabin in the country.”

  In fact, the name of this painting is “The Night Wind,” and it was painted by Charles Burchfield. In his journal, he reflects on it: “To a child sitting cozily at home. The roar of the wind outside fills his mind with various strange phantoms and monsters flying over the land.”

  And so I began to pursue Burchfield, after finding him in my pursuit of the captured girl. It was only then, turning the pages of a heavy book of his paintings, that I came across the fire in the forest and the cabin with its lighted window. Only then, almost twenty years after tearing it from the wall of Mrs. Abel’s cabin, did I know the name of the person who painted it.

  One afternoon in that summer of Mrs. Abel, my father asked me to sit down on a stump in the garden, where he was picking radishes, to talk with him. He said he had something important to say to me.

  He was kneeling, the sun shining down behind the cabin. He wore a broad-brimmed hat, his face in shadow, a red bandana around his neck. Bees zipped around us; a pine snake slipped away, under the low stone wall. I sat there anxiously, waiting for him to speak, uncertain if he was going to comment on something I had done or had not been doing. Had he been watching me more closely than it seemed?

  “In your life,” my father said, speaking with great earnestness, “one of the greatest pleasures, one of the most important uses of time is to daydream.”

  It is fitting that Charles Burchfield’s work should be found in the Thematic Apperception Test, housed in that blue box that is used to unlock a person, to allow a person’s storytelling to reveal him in ways that he cannot control or otherwise articulate. “The test recognizes,” its instructions explain, “that these fantasies and dreams are not less real than ‘actual overt deeds,’ and often more revelatory. What we hope and imagine and daydream is as real a part of our life, if invisible, than any action or conversation or outside appearance.”

  “In writing a diary,” Burchfield notes, in 1911, “I first thought that only events should be written; then gradually I began to put descriptions in which led me to describe my feelings at seeing different scenes and objects; now I think I ought to put in my imaginings, for they are part of a person’s life.”

  Charles Burchfield died in 1967, the same year I was born. He moves, resonates with me for many reasons, one of them being that in middle age he looked back at the work of his youth, more than thirty years before, and realized that he’d forgotten something, that he’d left something vital behind. As he writes in his journal on February 3, 1945: “A painting I destroyed at the time, which I now wish I had for reconstruction, was one of a blizzard in the woods. How little faith I had in what I was attempting at the time! How could I know that many years later I could complete these fumbling attempts at the impossible?” He added sheets of paper (he worked in watercolor) to his early paintings and expanded them, turning them into new compositions. As if he knew that he needed the energy, the blind boldness of youth, and now could couple it with the perspective and skills to match these earlier visions.

  More than anything, Burchfield was a painter of weather: “For me, let me have a wild ragged sky, an icy wind, and some snow, and I am content.”

  Sound is visible, in his paintings—the rising, bent lines of crickets calling, the hooked electrical song of power lines and the telephone lines, voices trembling in the air, shaking the countryside. His houses look slightly like people, warped by the rain and weather; winds have eyes, the jagged suggestions of faces (“Why is it that I cannot seem to express the feeling on a windy day? The wind catches our min
d, tears it loose from us and carries it far and wide. It is a feeling of supreme elation, of detachment from ordinary affairs”).

  Burchfield drew motifs, pencil drawings of spirals, curves, shaded curlicues that signified (and generated?) emotions. These he called “Conventions for Abstract Thoughts”—“Aimless brooding,” “Fear of Loneliness,” “Aimless Abstraction (Hypnotic Intensity),” “Morbid Brooding,” “Melancholy/Meditation/Memory of pleasant things that are perhaps gone forever”—and would disguise these symbolic pictographs as shadows in a steeple, the glare of a doorknob, clothing tossed over the back of a chair, to fix emotions in his paintings, to cast an atmosphere outward.

  In World War II, Burchfield served in a unit where he taught camouflage painting. His main occupation, before devoting himself to his art, was as a wallpaper designer. And what purpose does wallpaper serve, if not to cast a mood or emotion into a room, to provide an atmosphere in which it becomes possible that things might happen?

  - 38 -

  Sometimes the phone rings, and when I pick it up no one is there. When this happens, even after all these years, I often think of Mrs. Abel; might it be her, listening silently on the other end? This, despite the fact that we never once spoke to each other on the telephone.

  - 39 -

  One March morning, only months ago, I made breakfast for my daughters and walked them to school (my eldest held my hand so she could continue to read Ramona and Her Father as she walked), then rode my bike through the rainy streets of my neighborhood to swim laps in the pool; later, I sat alone in a gallery, gazing into photographs, colors all around me.