Nightlight

by Michael Cadnum

They reached the furniture, and ran fingers over a dusty desk. A draftsman’s table was equally dusty; every object had not been touched for a long time. It was a normal-size office and bedroom dwarfed by the immensity of the building. There was even a television. A closet had been built of unfinished plywood. It was stamped “exterior grade,” and the door was open a crack. Paul peered inside.

  “Darkroom,” he said. “No files, though.”

  “He doesn’t keep files. He has a computer.” Lise leaned over a small, blank screen. She pushed a switch and it squeaked. A green dot flickered and stayed on in the upper left corner. “Everything he wants to keep is stored here.”

  “He was organized.”

  “You gave me the impression he was a whimsical fellow.”

  “Well, he was.”

  “This is the working place of a very organized person. Look,” she said, whisking aside a shower curtain. “A toilet. A sink.” She touched an empty toothbrush holder attached to the wall. “He’s much tidier than most men.”

  “You’re good at this. What we are looking for is an address book. Somewhere he might have put the address of the place he was going to visit.” The pad beside the phone was blank. A single, well-sharpened pencil leaned against the coils of the phone cord like a miniature javelin.

  “I don’t want to look through his dresser,” said Lise.

  Paul tugged open the top drawer and saw a pile of jockey shorts. It was a neat pile, and beside it was a single white athletic sock, folded neatly. He closed the drawer. “He’s taken all his socks. All the ones with mates, anyway.” He glanced into the other drawers, but he saw only clothing, or places where clothing had been.

  The place was tidy and benign. There was a lack of the odds and ends Paul expected to find, and which a person would find in Paul’s own apartment. Scraps of paper, random paper clips, half-read books, magazines, empty cups. Perhaps when he left this place he had cleaned it compulsively, as people will before leaving on a journey.

  “I get the feeling he wasn’t expecting to come back here for a while,” Paul said, touching the cold surface of a hot plate.

  “There are hardly any books.”

  “I don’t think Len was much of a reader. Here’s an old Webster’s, and one of those godawful Good Housekeeping cookbooks. If he had a working library, about photography and such, he took it with him.” He ran a hand along the spine of a three-ring notebook, the sort of blue canvas binder a student might use. He slipped it off the shelf.

  Lise plucked something off the bulletin board. It dangled a white tag, which she peered at, and then she said, “Look!”

  The tag read, Dup.

  Paul fished into his pocket and brought out the key to the warehouse. It matched one of the keys. The other, a bronze brown key labeled Schlage, was enigmatic. “If this is a dupe, too, what’s it a duplicate of?” he wondered.

  “Nothing interesting, I’m afraid,” she said. “Why would he leave a spare key to a place he was going to visit lying around? Why would he even have a spare key? Anyway, this isn’t a house key.”

  Paul fingered the slim length of metal. “You’re right. You really are good at this. This is more like a key to an attaché case, or a desk. Or”—and he put out his hand to touch a green metal box which was not locked—“one of these metal boxes you usually don’t even bother to lock.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “The sort of stuff you might think about locking up, but would usually forget to.” He held up a handful of bank statements, and envelopes of canceled checks, all fastened with pink rubber bands.

  Lise snapped a rubber band off an envelope fat with checks. She sorted her way through there, lips pursed. Paul turned his attention to the blue canvas notebook. He opened it, and it made a crinkling sound, like something new that had not been used much.

  The notebook was filled with stiff plastic pages, and photographs had been fitted into slots in the plastic. A white label was pressed neatly into place beneath each picture, and careful handwriting, like the handwriting of a draftsman, deliberate, quick printing, described each picture. Colma 3–18, 2:15, read one caption. Above it was a picture of a dark green smear. Many captions, many dark pictures, deep shades of blue and green.

  When he realized what he was looking at, he closed the notebook.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Lise, looking up from a handful of checks.

  “I’m beginning to think that Len was very strange indeed. I’m looking through a photograph album he rigged up. Thinking I might see some naked women. Or birds, anyway. Sunsets. Instead, look.”

  “What are they?”

  “Photographs of cemeteries. Look, you can see the nameplates in the grass. Headstones over there. He went to the cemetery many times. Look, over a period of weeks. They aren’t very artful, either. I mean, they’re boring. They don’t show a damn thing. Like he was deliberately taking the dullest pictures he could.”

  “Or like he wasn’t interested in showing the usual things. Moonlight through the headstones, things like that.”

  “Long stretches of lawn. Actually, very nice, when you figure that the available light was lousy. That’s why I couldn’t figure out what I was looking at first. Patches of grass taken at three in the morning.”

  “He was trying to take pictures of spirits,” she said.

  “Yes. I knew that already. And now I see it. The man is crazy.”

  “This isn’t the studio of a deranged person.”

  “I don’t mean that he is mentally ill. I just mean, he has a very weird hobby.”

  She leafed through the album. “I wonder what he was looking for. If you saw a ghost, what would it look like?”

  Paul turned away from the pages of the album, unable to think of anything but the dream. The steps in the hall. The hand on the shoulder.

  “Crazy,” Paul breathed. “A fool’s errand.”

  “I don’t see anything that looks like a ghost,” Lise said, sounding disappointed.

  “What would a ghost look like? Stupid question, or little more than theoretical. But you could be looking right at a ghost in any of those pictures and not know it.” Paul stopped himself, suddenly irritated with this huge room. He got up and pushed a button on the computer. The machine sighed, and the dot vanished from the corner of the screen.

  He laughed. “I can’t get over the fact that a grown man would spend all this time and effort chasing ghosts. What a waste.”

  “You don’t believe in ghosts,” she said, closing the notebook. It was a statement, not a question.

  “No.” He did not ask if she did.

  She slipped the notebook back into its place on the shelf. “Maybe he doesn’t either. Maybe he is out to prove that there are no ghosts.”

  “Maybe,” he said, doubtfully. “But it’s impossible to prove a negative proposition. We can’t prove that his address is not in this room. If we can’t find it, all it means is that we can’t find it.”

  “We don’t have to find it,” she said, holding up a check.

  Paul held out his hand, but she was coy. “‘North Coast Realty.’ On the bottom it says, ‘Deposit, Parker Cabin.’”

  Paul held the check to the light from the windows high above, as if he could see through it. He turned it over. Pink bank stamps, and a line of fine ink, as if one of the check processing machines had leaked slightly. It was his cousin’s handwriting. Instead of delight at the discovery, he felt sorry to see his cousin’s handsome printing, his well-formed signature.

  His sorrow confused him. Didn’t he want to find his cousin?

  “The phone is dead,” she said. “We’ll call on the way.”

  “You like this, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do. It’s an adventure.”

  8

  Paul did not speak all the way down Market Street. When they were on the freeway, he said, “I don’t know why we want to go looking for such a fool.”

  She studied him. “What’s the matter?”

  �
�Nothing. Really, nothing. I just can’t believe that a grown man would be so wrapped up in ghost chasing that he would spend night after night taking pictures of nothing.”

  “I don’t believe in them.” She said it as if to prove a point. “But I have a sense of humor about it. It’s fun to imagine that there are ghosts, for a moment. To entertain the fantasy. It doesn’t hurt.”

  He shrugged. Maybe, he thought. He could not explain why such a foul mood had suddenly gripped him. Something about the check. No, that wasn’t it. Something about the pictures in the album. The dark expanse of blue-green lawns.

  He found himself glad that they had left the album exactly where they had found it. As if it had been a disgusting thing, filthy and sickening to look at.

  “So what, if your cousin liked to take pictures of nothing?”

  “I don’t like to see intelligent people waste their time,” he snapped.

  She ran her fingers through her hair, acting indifferent, but Paul could tell that she was surprised at his sudden anger.

  “I just don’t like to see it,” he repeated lamely.

  He was lying to himself. The thing that bothered him was that, looking back in his mind, he realized that the pictures hadn’t been completely empty. There had been glints off to one side in one picture, higher in another, streaks of light the eye mistook automatically as flaws in the print, and dismissed without examination, the way the eye ignores the speckles in a bad print at a bargain matinee.

  There had been things in those photographs that hadn’t belonged there.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what’s wrong. It only proves how badly I need to get away from everything.”

  “People need to believe in things like ghosts, sometimes,” Lise said, filing her thumbnail. “Our age is so matter-of-fact. We don’t believe in life after death. We don’t believe in any world but this one. This prosaic, empty landscape.”

  Paul glanced out the side window, through the steam on the glass. The Napa River emptied into the bay, shining, canvas-gray water spreading into broader, grayer water. The landscape was empty, he agreed to himself. He liked it empty.

  But he wanted to be careful to agree with Lise, and listen to her, and show her the best aspects of himself, because he had plans for this trip. Plans that did not include the mere search for a wayward cousin. Ordinarily, he would not be the least nervous about such a plan. But he found it amusing that he was.

  At some point during the next few days, he planned to ask Lise to marry him. He was a sophisticated man, and charming, and of course she would accept. They had known each other for three years, and she was probably wondering why he hadn’t asked long before. Paul gripped the steering wheel a little more tightly. He had his reasons, he thought. Until recently he had considered himself the sort of man who would never marry. There had been a wild affair ten years before, a passionate, sweaty fling with a beautiful landlady that had made him think of marriage, except that she had been entangled in a divorce that promised to drag on for months.

  He had nearly asked the landlady, though. He had rehearsed the question at night, alone in his own room, still aching from his visit to her, aware of her two flights down, asleep, breathing fumé blanc into her tastefully decorated chamber.

  And then, like one of those maple sugar candies in the shape of a deer or a woodsman, which pause on the tongue and then vanish, painfully sweet, the beautiful landlady decided that the divorce was not to be, and a handsome—heavyset, but handsome—spouse returned, grimly sure of himself. And husbandly, too, a quality Paul did not have, and did not think he could ever have, the ability to please a woman over the long run.

  Thank God he had never asked her, Paul thought, rolling down the car window just a crack to help clear the windshield. His defeat was secret, not a defeat at all. The potential wife faded into simply a more-passionate-than-normal escapade. But he had learned a lesson. He had told himself never again, ever, to consider marriage. But it was not the considering that was the problem. It was the asking and being refused. The asking and finding out that there was a distant lover who was coming back, after all, and here he is now on the doorstep, box of mixed chews under his hairy arm.

  Not that Lise had a lover tucked away somewhere. He didn’t think so, anyway. But marriage might be against some principle in her, some man-eating shark that sulked inside her like a call to the cloth. She might have a horror of marriage. And, perhaps, a secret horror of Paul which his proposal might bring out.

  These were considerations that were probably not worth thinking about for even a moment. But he couldn’t help it. He lacked, in spite of his self-assurance as a critic, a final touch of confidence. As if his strength as a journalist had to be offset with a growing uncertainty regarding women.

  Life is complicated, Paul consoled himself, as if an obscure truth was a salve. “Life is complicated,” he sighed aloud.

  “Yes,” she agreed.

  “You never know,” he added, in an attempt to disguise the fact that he had been thinking aloud.

  “No,” she said sadly. “If we knew, it would make a great deal of difference, wouldn’t it?”

  “Of course,” he said, mystified.

  “Would you take more risks if there were?”

  “Were what?”

  “Life after death.”

  “Risks?” he asked thoughtfully. “No, of course not.”

  “I would.”

  “Why? Do you go around ruining good clothes just because you know there are other clothes in the world, that are just as nice, maybe even better? We naturally want to conserve the life we have. Naturally.” The word seemed weak, so he repeated it. “Naturally,” and then he turned into a gas station to ask directions.

  No one emerged from the gas station office, so Paul climbed out of the car and ran, hunched against the rain. There was no one in the office. A voice called, “Right there.”

  A boy with greasy hands stood in the doorway, holding forth his hands to show why he had not responded sooner. His fingers were black, shiny black, and a drool of the stuff wended slowly down his arm. “Fill it?”

  “No, I just need to find North Coast Realty. It’s on L Street.”

  “No problem.” They both walked to the wall, where a map of Saint Helena was thumbtacked. “You’re here. You want to go here.” A forefinger left a dim black kiss at the edge of town. “They might not be there, though.”

  “I called ahead,” Paul said.

  But the boy had left him, and Paul was reluctant to step forth into the rain. It was already late afternoon, or perhaps not so late. The gray sky made it dark. The clock above the map said it was nine on the nose, and Paul wondered if it had died at exactly that moment, or if someone had moved the hands to that position.

  “No problem,” he said, wiping the inside of the windshield with a Kleenex.

  “Turn on the heater,” she said.

  “It doesn’t work very well. It never did.” This was a cheerless thing to say, and it made him sound incompetent. He turned the dial to High.

  North Coast Realty was a log cabin painted red. A redwood tree towered over it, and Paul paused under the tree to comb his hair, before jogging to the door and finding it locked.

  He swore and knocked. There was dim movement somewhere inside, and the knob twisted like an object trying to escape. The door opened, and a huge pale face smiled down upon Paul.

  The man seemed delighted, and kept Paul’s hand a moment longer than normal. “Ed Garfield. And you are”—he touched his ear lobe as if it were the seat of memory—“Paul Wright. The restaurant fellow.”

  Paul agreed brightly that he was indeed.

  “So how can we help you?” The man had a comfortable voice, strangely like a man pretending to be a talking cartoon creature, a friendly bear, or a wise old horse.

  Paul had explained on the telephone, but perhaps the man wanted to hear it in person. The man folded large wrinkled hands over a woolly sweater, and leaned back in his chair
.

  Paul finished.

  The man looked up at the ceiling. “I’ remember the young man perfectly well. I only do a little managing nowadays. Semiretired. Wife not well …”

  Paul made a murmur of sympathy.

  “… and I don’t know. I could always take work or leave it alone.”

  They both laughed about leaving work alone.

  “But you know. I really can’t help you.”

  Paul straightened in his chair.

  “Can’t. Your young man said not to let anybody bother him in any way. Not a soul. For any reason at all. Period.”

  The man—it was hard to call him something so blunt as “Ed”—said these words in the voice of a Walt Disney character. But his eyes were the twinkleless organs of a man who had handled a good deal of money in his day, and could sell anything to anybody.

  Paul appreciated this sort of man. This baggy-faced oaf would never go into the restaurant business, a business prickly with so many risks. He would stay forever in real estate, his investments greening under the steady rain.

  Paul relaxed. “You’re right, of course. I would do exactly what you are doing.”

  “Of course, in the emergency situation. A mother. A relative. Well, you know.”

  “Absolutely. Your fiduciary responsibility doesn’t extend to keeping secrets.”

  “Oh, secrets.” The man laughed, a single mild guffaw. “But you know, that Parker cabin.”

  Paul waited, uncertain. When the man did not continue, Paul said, “No. Is it a historical place?”

  “No.” The man felt his sweater and chuckled shortly. “No, not historical. Except to stretch the meaning. Some pioneers died up there of cholera. You can see the graves if you look around. That’s hardly major history.”

  Paul felt a twitch of impatience, but smiled.

  “Except to stretch the meaning all out of shape,” the man said slowly, with a strangely unpleasant expression on his face. “It’s not the sort of place you would see a whole lot about in any of the guide books. But it’s a very remarkable place.”

  “Tell me more about it.”

  The man looked beyond Paul, out the window, watching the rain. “A charming place. Remote. Hard to get to. And very picturesque. Native stone. Fireplace.” As he spoke he did not seem to be thinking the words he was saying, but other, much different words.