A Dark Matter: A Novel

by Peter Straub

  After her mother’s vanishing act, the Eel, Lee Truax, raised herself. She made herself do her homework, she shopped and made meals, she helped herself with her homework and put herself to bed at night, and she figured out that whatever you did had long-term consequences. She learned that people tell you all about themselves by the way they act and the things they say. All you had to do was pay attention. People opened themselves up, put everything on display, and never knew they were doing it.

  Although not gay, the Eel decided early on that because boys always ran things and gave the orders she would prefer to look like a boy rather than a girl, so she took out the good scissors and gave herself a Mo Howard bowl cut, and started going around in blue jeans and plaid shirts. Dressed like that, under her weird haircut, she looked like the Platonic ideal of a tomboy. As long as you took the time to look at her with the same concentration she gave you, all of this somehow made her incredibly cute. If you just casually, lazily took her in and let your eyes roam elsewhere, you would probably think she was on the plain side. You might even take her for a boy.

  Hootie loved her, God knows I loved her, and if the other two guys in our group did not bring exactly the same kind of emotion to their relationships with her, they felt close to her in a comfortable, uncomplicated way— almost as if she really were another boy their age, albeit one they wished to protect. They did their best to protect Hootie, too, so it wasn’t because she was female. Half the time, I think they almost forgot that she wasn’t just another boy. I had been tremendously fond of these guys, and I trusted them absolutely. They were the people with whom I spent most of the day and hung out with at night, the people I talked to on the phone after school. Once Boats Boatman and Dilly Olson understood that I was not a snob, despite the disadvantage of actually living in a house that was pretty ritzy by their standards, plus having an intact set of parents, they relaxed around me and started treating me the same way they treated themselves, with a rough, affectionate good humor. Like Hootie, like my wife in her particular way, these two young men had been ruined, I thought, by whatever Spencer Mallon had caused to happen out in that damned meadow.

  Going back a step, I could also say that their wretched fathers had trashed their lives by scarpering off, which made them vulnerable to peripatetic wisdom merchants like Mallon. Nobody ever says this, but in the sixties these frauds were all over the place, especially in towns with college campuses. Sometimes they were homegrown, academics who jumped off the rails and used their classrooms as pulpits, but just as often they wandered in from nowhere, preceded by a little bubble of promissory excitement built up by acolytes who had been converted during the guru/philosopher/sage’s last visit. Generally, they stuck around for a month or so, sleeping on their admirers’ couches or spare beds, “borrowing” their hosts’ clothing, accepting free meals and free drink, sleeping with the hosts’ girlfriends and other female admirers. Everybody owned everything, according to them, so naturally they had a right to all of their followers’ possessions. Ownership was a morally suspect concept. Spencer Mallon told the Mallon-ites that “everything is everything,” which extended the usual nonpossessive mind-set into the cosmos. Even when I was seventeen I thought all this was claptrap, a variety of nonsense particularly friendly to predators. But I was raised in a reasonable home by reasonable people.

  Jason Boatman, whom we called “Boats” for two obvious reasons, was being raised almost entirely by his mother, Shirley. We all liked Shirley Boatman, and she liked us back, especially the Eel, but it was no secret that the slight drinking problem she had before her husband deserted her had blossomed into something much more serious after that. Shirley was a long way from Carl Truax’s passionate surrender to alcohol, but she drank a beer with breakfast and nipped at the gin bottle all afternoon. By nine o’clock at night, she was so deeply in the bag that she usually passed out in her chair.

  Seven years before Spencer Mallon’s arrival in Madison, Boats’s father, who had been running a struggling boatbuilding enterprise in Milwaukee and commuting back and forth three or four times a week, announced that he had fallen in love with a twenty-year-old apprentice boatbuilder named Brandi Brubaker. She had come to him from the UW boathouse, like a lot of his underpaid assistants and apprentices. He and Brandi would be renting a place near the boatyard on Lake Michigan, and in the future his visits to Madison would be to continue his work for the rowing team and to see his son.

  The visits to his son soon petered out to once a month, then stopped altogether. His business picked up, and probably he had less time to give to his old family. Cunning little Brandi had soon produced a pair of twins, Candee and Andee. They were “adorable.” Boats lost whatever interest he had once had in boats and boat-building, and would happily have traded his father for any of the others’, even Dilly Olson’s, who had run off ten years earlier, never to be heard from again.

  At seventeen and eighteen, Jason Boatman was a pretty good-looking kid until you put him alongside Dilly, who made him look furtive and shifty. That he actually was kind of furtive and shifty did not trouble those of us who had been his friends since grade school. Before his father abandoned him, Boats had been fairly outgoing, cheerful, and easy to read. He was skinny and on the tall side, the kind of nice, friendly kid who goes along with what everybody else wants to do. After his father left, he buried his sense of humor and became morose. He didn’t talk as much, and his shoulders slumped. He walked around with his hands in his pockets, staring at the ground, as if looking for something he had lost. Boats completely gave up on school. In class, he sat nearly sideways at his desk and gave the blackboard the suspicious look you’d have for someone you suspected was lying to you. His dominant mode was mild grievance. If you went to his house, instead of hello he’d say something like “About time you showed up.” He stopped reading books and participating in sports. His conversation became taciturn, almost reluctant, except for when he complained. Complaint brought out a recognizable version of the Boats we remembered from grade school, observant, voluble, wholly present. These arias centered on our teachers, the books they assumed we would read and the homework they assumed we would tackle each night, the weather, the brutality of athletes, the sloppiness of the school janitor, his mother’s blurriness as the evening wore on. Boats and the Eel could swap drunken parent stories like a saxophone player and a drummer trading fours. But no matter how far-ranging his laments over the state of the world, Boats never spoke of his father. Every now and then, apropos of nothing, he shook his head and muttered, “Brandi Brubaker,” coughing up the name of his father’s new wife like a hairball.

  The other great change that befell Jason “Boats” Boatman after his father split involved a ferocious concentration on shoplifting. He started thieving on a heroic scale. It was like a binge, only it never stopped. What do you call that, a spree? Boats went on a lifelong thieving spree. Back in the fifth grade, all of my friends now and then swiped things like candy bars, comic books and paperbacks, and school supplies from the neighborhood shops, but there was no consistency or pattern to it. None of us did it all the time, and I did it less than most. Sometimes, Eel or Dilly Olson couldn’t afford to get the new notebook or ballpoint pen some teacher wanted to see on our desks, and the only way to get the required object was to go around to the stationery store and swipe it. Boats acted exactly the same way up until about a month or so after his father took off. Then wherever he went, he dipped into stores and ransacked whatever he could, he stole everything he could carry out on his person. He gave us so many sweaters and sweatshirts that some of our parents got suspicious. (Not the Eel’s father, of course.) Shirley Boatman could see what was going on, and she warned Boats that one day he’d get pinched and have to go to court. The warning had no effect.

  Eel told me, and it made a lot of sense even then, that he used all these shoes, socks, underpants, UW T-shirts, erasers, notebooks, pencils, staplers, and books to feed a howling emptiness within him. When Mallon came along and scoope
d them all up, he now and again deputized Boats to nab various items for him. According to Mallon’s theories, Boats wasn’t stealing anything, he was just redistributing it. Because everything was everything, nobody, especially shop owners, owned any of the property they imagined theirs. It always struck Eel and me as funny that if Boats actually believed in Mallon’s theories, he would stop stealing on the spot. As far as he was concerned. the whole point of theft was that whatever you slipped under your coat really belonged to someone else—that’s why putting it under your coat made you feel better. The sense of a fleeting superiority helped feed the emptiness within. But of course everything that entered that cruel space was instantly consumed.

  I have mentioned that going over to State Street to hang out in the Aluminum Room and pretend to be UW students was Dill Olson’s idea, and this was typical of Donald Olson’s role in our little band. Don Olson would have been a leader wherever he went to school: he was one of those kids who possess a natural, built-in authority that seems rooted in a deep personal decency. The way he looked undoubtedly added to this already considerable personal authority. During grade school, he was always taller than the rest of us, and by his senior year in high school he had topped out at six-two. His height would have been insignificant had it not been in a sense magnified or spotlighted by the effect of his deep dark eyes, crisp dark eyebrows, high-cut cheekbones, mobile and expressive mouth, smooth unblemished olive complexion, rather longish dark hair that fell nearly to his collar, and effortlessly immaculate posture. He always stood as straight as a marine, but gracefully, as if nothing could be more natural than perfect posture.

  If Dilly Olson had used his handsomeness for gain, if he had demonstrated an awareness of its effect and pleasure in that awareness, if he had betrayed any trace of self-love, he would have been ruined—in a different way, I mean, than he was, in effect, ruined by the course of his life. Instead, he seemed to have no idea that he was incredibly handsome, or to feel that his obvious good looks were irrelevant to the real business of his life. What that real business might be was still an unknown quantity. If we had lived in New York City or Los Angeles, someone would almost certainly have come along to suggest that Dill Olson become an actor, but we lived in Wisconsin, and no one we knew had ever become an actor or, for that matter, any other sort of artist. We saw a lot of movies, but the people who acted in them were clearly the products of some other, more elevated realm. They were remote from us, those actors. Even the air they breathed was another substance than the workaday stuff we inhaled.

  Unlike me, Dill did not read books as if they, too, were meant to be inhaled and thereafter to inform your thoughts and actions. He never got lost in a book, he was not academic or scholarly in any sense, and it seemed that he could never follow the path that Lee Truax and I had set upon, that of going to college and feeling our way into our futures through the usual means of exploring a curriculum. He could not afford college anyhow. His mother and her stuffy and alcoholic new boyfriend, a credit union officer whose dearest wish was that Donald Olson leave home for good, had let him know they would not pay for college tuition.

  That Dill would get some ordinary office job or become a clerk in a shop seemed impossible, unjust, and the draft board, otherwise eager to devour young men just like him, had already declined his services because of a faulty valve in his heart: in a moment of boredom and despair, he had tried to enlist, naturally without telling anyone, and been declared 1-Y, medically unfit until such time as grade-school students were issued guns and helmets, which surprised the army recruiters as much as it disappointed him, briefly. As time went on and the demonstrations grew louder and more frequent, Dill learned enough about what was going on in Vietnam simultaneously to be distressed by the war and grateful for his draft status.

  Actually, the conflict in Vietnam gave him a cause that helped take his mind off the depressing subject of what he would do after he graduated. Madison West forbade any form of outright political expression as a matter of policy, and our principal, a World War II veteran, would probably have done his best to expel any student bold enough to organize or participate in an antiwar gathering on school property. We didn’t need our own, though, because we could fall into the speak-ins, teach-ins, marches, and crowd scenes that were always taking place on and immediately around the university’s campus. By 1966, Madison was well on its way to the aggrieved, rolling boil of 1968, and all the protests and marches gave Dilly lots of opportunities to meet college girls at the same time that he genuinely protested against the war.

  And Boats cared about the war, too, because he feared being snatched up by the army the day he graduated from high school, but he was far more interested in college girls and fraternity parties.

  Unless I’m wrong about this, part of Mallon’s appeal to Dilly Olson lay in his attitude toward Vietnam. Mallon made it clear that he thought the war was necessary at that specific time—he seemed to have a semi-religious feeling about violence, which he saw as a kind of birth—although he implied that his final goal, attainable through a certain occult ceremony, involved using a sacred violence as a means of so transforming our earth that the war in Vietnam would end of itself, like a weed deprived too long of water. The fire would devour the fire, the hurricane devastate the rampaging typhoon. It was something like that, anyhow. After all this destruction would come a rebirth, the dimensions and nature of which were to be explored joyfully by Mallon and his chosen few. I have to give that fraud this much, that he told Dilly, Boats, my wife, and his other three followers, Meredith Bright, Keith Hayward, and Brett Milstrap, that the great transformation and rebirth might last only a second or two, also that it might take place only in their minds, as the opening of a fresh vision, a truer, more essential way of seeing things. Despite the damage he caused to every one of these kids, I have to respect his honesty on this point. Like every other phony sage and prophet wandering through campuses in the mid-to late sixties, Spencer Mallon promised an end to time and a new apocalypse; unlike most of the others, he admitted that the end of time might last only a moment, or take place only in the throwing open of a mental window. I hate the man, I think he was a phony who got lucky in the worst possible way, but I have to respect this evidence of what feels to me like wisdom. If not wisdom, a conscience.

  My girlfriend—Lee Truax, the Eel—and her companions went to the Tick-Tock Diner, called the Aluminum Room for the odd, reflective, tinfoil-like material covering its walls, and in that unlikely little dump a stunning blond girl named Meredith Bright welcomed the Eel and Hootie into the end booth where she sat alone with a copy of a book called Love’s Body by Norman O. Brown (one of Spencer Mallon’s guides and teachers, in this case literally). Down at the front of the diner, terrible Keith Hayward and his roommate, Milstrap, regarded the scene in jealousy and disgust. (It should be noted that even at this first meeting, both my wife and Hootie found Keith Hayward oddly unsettling.) True to her time if not her type, Meredith had some expertise in concocting horoscopes, and it turned out that she had wheedled Mallon, her guru and lover, into letting her draw up a horoscope, or maybe a series of horoscopes, I’m not sure how this works, to determine the astrological signs most desirable in his followers. According to her calculations, the group required a Taurus and a Pisces, exactly what Eel and Hootie were, to accomplish its ends. Less urgently, they also needed a Scorpio and a Cancer, Dilly’s and Boat’s ssigns. So they were doomed from the start, all of them. It was in their stars.

  I’m sure this was genuine: I don’t believe Meredith cooked up a phony chart after encountering my friends in the Aluminum Room. Although to me such recognitions cannot but sound delusional, I believe that Meredith Bright understood that Eel and Hootie satisfied her crucial astrological requirements the minute she spotted them staring up at her from the bottom end of the counter. I think of how innocent they must have looked, how tremendously innocent they actually were, and how appealingly innocent they must have seemed to Mallon, who devoured innocence who
lesale. Having guessed what she needed only to confirm, Meredith summoned Eel and Hootie before her with a beckoning look, and after asking for their names, she did the same for their astrological signs. Bingo! On the money! And what luck, a Taurus and a Cancer were sitting right down at the end of the counter, what do you know, they must all come to an eight o’clock gathering, two nights hence, in the lower room at La Bella Capri. Please. Pretty please, with sugar on the top. Meredith Bright actually said that.

  Because they could not have resisted any such invitation from the world’s most desirable woman, they immediately agreed to show up in the downstairs dining room of the State Street Italian restaurant they had known all their lives. The Eel asked me to come along, Dilly tried to cajole me into joining them, but I had not gazed into the bottomless, speaking eyes of Meredith Bright, and I said no. It was not even as though they were still pretending to be UW students, because Meredith Bright had understood from the first that they were in high school. My friends and my lover, for Lee Truax and I had been sleeping together since our fifth date, tried but failed to sell me on the mystery and glamour of Spencer Mallon (as described by Miss Bright).

  And the next time we were alone, Eel asked me, “You really don’t want to go? It’ll be so cool, it’ll be so interesting! This Mallon guy won’t be like anyone you’ve ever seen before. Come on, sweetie, don’t you want to meet a real, I don’t know, magician? A traveling wise man who has something to teach us?”