He went to sleep, and woke soon after in slightly cooler water. This he knew, but he seemed to feel no heat, no cold. He thought of all the things he knew. He knew so many things. Why up was the same as down, how he lived on a planet smaller than a mote of dust, all alone in indifferent space so wide that in the reaches of his mind, when he tried to conceive of it, his imagination slid over the smooth edge of eternity and fell forever. Yet came back, somehow was back inside his head, fragile and illusive.
He dreamed of cloud walls all around him that turned and were cleaved, and he moved down a long passage his mind projected as if it were a light sharp as blades. Soon the walls ended in folds and misty geysers that shot away violently and disappeared, and there was the dark, warm city, at Christmas, with the snow drifting off the lake. He descended at his will, down into Lester Park among the tall pines, the three boys coming home late, wet, warm, cheering the snow, planning labyrinths, invincible in their understanding. Their laughter turned visible, like sparks and flames in the falling snow. Blue, red, green—the colors of Christmas. Yay! he heard them yell, faintly as they crossed the bridge over the river that splashed in the dark down toward the lake. As their yells and laughter faded homeward across the park, his heart turned inside out with love.
During the next few days, Harry began to worry about what, exactly, it was that kept Jimmy out until suppertime each night. He’d come right home from school, change his clothes, and work on whatever it was, out there, on into the dark. He looked exhausted, yet he spent all of his after-school time out there in the snow. All he would say was that he was building a fort of some kind.
On Friday morning, Harry went to the plant with a slightly queasy feeling because he had to fire two men. One was a maintenance man, a carpenter. He took it as if he had expected it all the time, but the other man was an assistant in purchasing, who said in a surprised, shocked voice that he had never “got let go” before from any job. Harry told him that it wasn’t a matter of his competence but one of organization. This was not exactly true, and after the man had left his office his head began to throb, and he felt vaguely nauseated. He told his secretary he’d be back after lunch, and went home.
“I don’t want to be sneaky,” he said to Ruth, “but I’ve got to see what Jimmy’s doing out there. He won’t tell me anything.”
“I’m so worried about him,” Ruth said. “He used to be such a normal boy. He used to be so happy with us.”
Harry put on a pair of old pants, a mackinaw, and boots. He didn’t intend to tell Jimmy he’d gone to look, if he could get away with it, and again he had the queasy feeling that came from deception. Had there ever been a time in his life when he lived simply, and never had to tell anything but the truth? He couldn’t remember, but there must have been such an innocent time—a time before it had become necessary to manipulate, to be devious. Was it in his childhood? No, he could not honestly say that; there had always been secrets to be kept. And yet he had a twinge of yearning for such a time—also a moment of fear, as though he had gone out just too far on thin ice, and yearned for the shore.
Jimmy’s path led around back of the garage into the trees. Its bottom was smooth and hard, and he didn’t have to worry about leaving tracks; he needn’t have changed his clothes, he thought, and began to make little of his spying. He’d just look, turn around, and come back. But at the end of the path he found only unorganized piles of snow around the main pile made by the plows. Nothing. Then he saw that certain tracks, or more permanent depressions, seemed to lead to one place, though an attempt had been to disguise this. Two big disks of snow hid the door, and as Harry moved them carefully aside, knowing that he would remember exactly how they had been placed, his guilt came back; this place was really meant to be a secret. Now he could never talk to Jimmy about it.
He got down on his hands and knees and looked inside. Dim light came from above, bluish white. The interior seemed very large, and across the room an arched doorway led into sheer blackness. He would be required to do more than just look, and he was a little afraid. This place could be physically dangerous to Jimmy, he supposed, but that wasn’t what occupied him now, or caused any of his fear. As he crawled inside, the blue surrounded him—this strange room created by his son; in a brutal way he seemed to be entering his son’s mind, that protected place that had always seemed so large in proportion to the little boy’s mere body. His knees made dents upon the floor. On each side of the room, red candles stood in niches carved from the walls, and in a long cardboard box he found the entrenching tool that used to hang on the rear wall of the garage. He remembered the half-melted candles now. And the entrenching tool—he had never missed it at all, and this seemed not only a dereliction of his observation, but a dereliction of his love.
In order to see past the arched doorway, he had to take one of the candles and light it. The walls turned warmly white, and he saw how carefully they had been smoothed and made square. He couldn’t go down the farther passage because the sill was raised, and his weight would squash the whole floor down. But he could look down that hallway to its end, which was obviously unfinished. Where would it go? Where did Jimmy want to go down there? God, it was a marvelous and scary place, this sculptured cave, and how proud a boy would be of it! But Jimmy had done it all alone, for his own lonely purposes, and Harry felt awe for his son’s determination. Kids just didn’t stick to anything this long, or work so hard. Then he had, again, the hollow, painful feeling that he could now see what he would never be told. This dark cave. Yes, it was a marvelous cave, but he knew Jimmy never intended to show it to him.
He put the candle back, and blew it out, then tried to erase all the signs of his intrusion. With his fists he beat out the impressions his knees had made in the floor, and when he came out into daylight again he took a long time to hide the entrance exactly as Jimmy had.
“It’s a snow cave, sort of,” he said to Ruth when he returned to the house. “You won’t mention to Jimmy that I’ve seen it.”
“All right.”
“I mean this, Ruth. Can you possibly keep your mouth shut about it?” He heard the hard edge of his voice, and saw it strike her. She was hurt, but he meant to impress her. He had to make sure, and again he felt brutal. “It’s important he doesn’t know. Do you understand?”
“I don’t understand anything!” she said, and her eyes became glossy.
“I don’t either,” he said. “Jesus Christ, I don’t either.”
“I thought when I made the house right,” Ruth said. “When I fixed the house, we could all be happy again. Remember when Jimmy was a baby?” She put her hand on his arm. “We had more time for everything then, didn’t we?”
“We had less money,” he said.
“That’s right. You didn’t have to work so hard.”
“It’s not that, Ruth. I don’t think I work harder than I did then. I’ve just got less time left over.”
“We used to go skating.”
“Yes, we did,” he said, and he remembered the gliding, the showing off, the time when everything he did had been a kind of friendly competition. He remembered that time, sadly, but without a real sense of loss.
That night when Jimmy came in from his cave, he coughed, and it sounded like the blat of a sheep. Harry watched him try to keep from coughing. His eyes were dark, desperate, and his arms shook inside his jacket sleeves. Ruth heard the cough, and came running.
“It’s all right,” Jimmy said. “I feel fine.”
“Get the thermometer!” Ruth cried. “It’s in the bathroom cabinet upstairs!”
When Harry came back with the thermometer, Ruth had Jimmy’s wet clothes off, and they hustled him upstairs, with the thermometer sticking out of his mouth, and wrapped him, scowling and muttering, in a blanket. His temperature was 104.
“I don’t care!” he yelled. “I feel fine!” Promptly he went into a kind of fit. He kicked the blanket off him entirely, and started to get up. Harry had to hold him down, and it was like holding
a fluttering bird. Jimmy was so weakly violent, and the way he moved his arms and legs seemed as strange as the movements of a bird—as though the joints and muscles were not made to move the way a human’s did. Harry was so surprised at this behavior he lost his breath, and couldn’t speak. He just held Jimmy down on the bed. Ruth called the doctor, and as they waited for him they tried to soothe Jimmy, but nothing worked. First he froze and then he burned, and when he stopped fighting them it was only because of exhaustion.
The doctor was a heavy old man who wheezed after climbing the stairs. He examined Jimmy, who glared at him silently. “He’s going to be in bed for a while,” the doctor said. “If he keeps fighting you, you’ll have to take his temperature rectally.”
“But what is it he’s got?” Ruth asked.
The doctor shook his head. “Who knows what’s going around? Might as well call it flu as anything. Just keep an eye on him, and if he don’t improve, let me know.” He said he’d call in a prescription to the pharmacy and Harry could pick it up. “I’ve got ten other cases in town just like this. It’ll last three, four days, and then, when the fever goes, he’ll be weak as a dishcloth for a few days. Give him aspirin. Make him take liquids. Keep him in bed.” The doctor packed his satchel and left.
Jimmy glared and shivered; he seemed only to be waiting for his strength to come back.
“Jimmy,” Harry said, “will you stay in bed?” Jimmy’s teeth clicked, and Harry saw hatred in his face. Why did he deserve that? “Jimmy,” he said, “we want to help you get well.” The boy’s pale face, pale as paper, turned ugly. For a moment Harry couldn’t recognize him, as though he could read there no person at all, just pure obstinacy and hatred. Harry’s anger rose in him icily, like the pulse of a wave, and receded, leaving him weak and empty. “But will you stay in bed like we ask?”
“Yes,” Jimmy said, and turned his face away.
To Jimmy it was not the days that passed but the undulations of his fever. His stomach ached, his bones ached; he sweated and then lay in icy water. Only when he began to get well did his real desperation return, and he feared for the secrecy of his cave. He knew what would happen to it if someone found it. What did you do when you found a thing made of snow? You destroyed it, because it was only snow. He could see himself jumping on the roof, and bringing the arched ceiling down into meaningless rubble. Even now some boy might be having that instinctive fun.
One night he woke in the dark, feeling that he had crossed that indefinable point where, no matter what happens, the body has won, and is mending. His bones no longer ached; he was merely weak. He heard himself whimper, and decided that he couldn’t live, actually could not continue to live, without knowing if his cave had been discovered. He got out of bed, and stood balancing himself in the dark. His feet had become so sensitive that the rug stung them as he sneaked down the stairs. In the hall closet he found his outdoor clothes by touch, and put them on over his pajamas. He cried silently when he couldn’t, at first, find his other boot, and cried again when he had too much trouble pulling it on, but he made no sound. He had no fear of the dark of the middle of the night, and this seemed a kind of illness itself, and proved to him that his desperation was real. On the way out through the garage, he stopped and took the flashlight from the dashboard of the car, and then went out on his path.
The cave had been found. The door was uncovered and partly broken, as though someone had stood up too soon on the way out. The bent candles were all strewn around in the packed snow in front, where strange feet had scuffled and stamped. The cardboard box had been taken outside and squashed, and the entrenching tool was not in it.
He looked inside the doorway, and saw where careless shoulders had crunched into his walls and ruined them. With their knowledge of his cave they had killed it; he would never go inside again. He heard his own voice crying, and the sound was so undeserved, had been caused by such brutal unfairness, that he began to rage, and threw himself against the door. They would never enter it again, either. With all his strength he climbed up and jumped upon the cave, breaking it into chunks and slabs, filling up the floor. He could still hear himself crying.
Harry woke up in a sweat; either he was coming down with Jimmy’s flu, or he’d forgotten to turn down the thermostat before coming to bed. It was four in the morning, the unprotected time when all disasters, all regrets and failures, are poised upon the exposed surface of the mind like water spiders on surface tension—on nothing, really, but a kind of delicate force. Ruth slept on, and at the end of each of her long breaths of sleep she slightly voiced a sigh, as though she were having a sad dream. When he raised the blankets, cold reached out of the heat of the room and laid an icy hand on his chest. He decided to move; any sort of action was better than lying here in the power of his thoughts. He’d check the thermostat and take some aspirin.
On the way, he looked in on Jimmy and found him missing. He wasn’t in the bathroom. No lights seemed to be on downstairs; careful not to wake Ruth, he went down to see. Jimmy’s outdoor clothes and boots were gone, and he quickly got into his own, putting his overshoes on over his bare feet. The car door was open and the flashlight was gone, but it was a clear night, and the stars themselves seemed to give him light as he followed Jimmy’s path toward the cave.
At first he thought Jimmy was in a fight. He heard thrashing and crying, and the flashlight beam swung wildly against the trees and across the snow. He came on the run, and grabbed Jimmy up in his arms. Jimmy struggled violently, and again Harry thought of the feeble violence of a bird.
“Get away! Leave me alone!” Jimmy cried.
“Jim,” Harry said. “Jim—“
“It’s ruined!” Jimmy cried. He struggled, trying to bend Harry’s fingers back so he could get loose. “Get out of here! Leave me alone!” He sobbed and hiccupped; his teeth clicked in anger, and his only purpose was to get loose, to get away.
“Listen, Jim! Listen!” Harry said, and shook him, but Jimmy only struggled harder.
“God damn you!” Jimmy yelled, and Harry let him go. At first Jimmy turned toward his cave, then ran back along his worn path toward the house. Harry picked up the flashlight, shone it once across the tumbled wreckage of Jimmy’s marvelous cave, and then followed him back to the house.
Ruth was up, and they put Jimmy back to bed. He was tired, sad, and lay there moving his head slowly from side to side.
“You do feel better, don’t you, Jimmy?” Ruth said.
Jimmy nodded, yet his large dark eyes were blank, and his mouth was set. He didn’t reply when they turned out his light and said good night.
When they were back in bed, Ruth moved toward Harry and put her hand on his chest. “Is he going to be all right?” she asked.
“Somebody found his snow house and ruined it,” Harry said, “but I suppose that was inevitable.”
“It’s a shame,” she said. “What was it like?”
“Very elaborate. He’d done a remarkable job for a boy.”
“Why do you think he did it—worked so hard on it?” Ruth asked.
The radiator hissed and ticked; he’d forgotten to check the thermostat, and now he’d have to get up and do it. He lay there for a moment with her hand like a weight on his chest. There had been a time in his childhood, too, before his friends had grown old and tame, when the great lake rose in the winter, terrible and magic, into walls of blue ice, and the snow drifted high as the houses. Lying in bed, he saw himself as a child amid the wonder of those snow-clad houses, and he felt a sudden stab of envy toward that child, who lived in a world he never had to make. Now, he thought, he understood what his son was trying to do out there in the snow. “He was trying to make Duluth,” he said.
Paranoia
MY NAME is Aaron Benham, and I am a writer of fiction, a college professor, and an unwilling collector of paranoiacs. Perhaps I am no more surrounded by paranoiacs than anyone else, but sometimes I wonder. Like those who fear dogs only to excite in all dogs an immediate, aggressive affection
, I seem doomed to be the chosen confessor of those who have systematized their delusions. I wonder if they know how much they frighten me.
Long ago I used to try to explain to them that the world was mainly plotless, chaotic, random. I used to have that warmth and time. In spite of their eyes that are always bright beyond mere alertness, as bright beyond the tender depths of protoplasm as polished gemstones, I once, in my surfeit of time, brought them home for a drink and tried to explain. That was before I knew how short life was, how long it takes to learn the craft I am apprenticed to.
This morning I have just finished reading a short novel written by G., a student. At three this afternoon, in my office at school, we will have a conference. I ought immediately to tell him that he has no ear for dialogue, that his few metaphors consistently violate his intent, and finally that his chief motive for writing, so clearly revealed in his novel, is not the creation of art but an attempt to create legitimate targets for vengeance. His villains are carefully prepared and set up for their deserved reward, and his hero is armed and ready. Armed, in this case, with a weapon G. actually carries himself; he once proudly showed me the knife he carries in his boot—a vicious little dagger he calls an “Arkansas toothpick.”
In the last conference I had with G. a week ago, he chose not to discuss the short story he had written, but to tell me about the universal cheating in courses where multiple-choice tests are given. At other times he has revealed to me the blatant callousness, cynicism, laziness, senility, dope addiction, and suspected perversions of my colleagues. In his revelatory stance he is more than a little threatening. He leans his shoulders toward me smiling the bitter yet triumphant smile of one who knows all, and demands that I enter his world. I, too, should find in the discovery of evil the joy that keeps his eyes so icy bright.
You can see why I’m not looking forward to the three-o’clock conference with G. His intimidating attitude causes me to be dishonest with him, and in that sense he is right; his psychosis is not all fantasy. It is the encompassing magnitude of his “delusional system” that disheartens me, that diminishes my soul and makes me evade my responsibilities toward him. He excludes the world until there is only he and I, and in that small cold cell I am lonely and apprehensive. So I nod, or shake my head in feigned wonder, and wait for the hour to pass.
Leah, New Hampshire Page 11
