A Dark Matter: A Novel

by Peter Straub

  “What an odd thing to say, Mrs. Walsh.”

  “Such a beautiful little girl, with that funny tomboy appeal.” Having flashed her claws, she indulged her curiosity again. “The other beautiful child among you was Hootie. Honestly, Hootie was practically edible. A little blue-eyed china doll! How is he doing, after all this time?”

  “Hootie was very sick for a long time, but in the past few days he has made amazing progress. He was living in a mental hospital, but now there’s some hope he will be able to move into a halfway house.”

  “He had a real, honest-to-God breakthrough,” Don said. “Ever since that day out in the meadow, Hootie could only communicate by quoting from The Scarlet Letter. Later on, he added another book or two, but he only used his own words when his doctor tried to throw us out.”

  “Well, well,” said Meredith, only superficially engaged. “He wanted you to stay with him, I gather.”

  “It’s actually a wonderful compromise,” I said. “Hootie realized that he remembered every word of every book he’d ever read, which meant that everything he could ever want to say was covered! He could pull it all up, too. In seconds, he could identify where everything came from.”

  “A lovely story,” Meredith said. “Lee, don’t you ever wish you had joined in, come along?”

  “Not really,” I said. “I wouldn’t want my version of what happened to get between everyone else and theirs.”

  “If you had been there, you could have kept an eye on your girlfriend.”

  “Meaning what?”

  Meredith Walsh broke eye contact. The way she moved her head and the expression on her face returned to me the vivid image of a harsh and pitiless old woman I had several times encountered in a Turkish street market. She had tried to soften her appearance with a lot of rouge and kohl, and sat half crouched behind a table strewn with bracelets and earrings: a street peddler, a bargainer for advantage.

  “I don’t mind throwing things away,” she said. “I don’t mind discarding things, destroying things. That’s about choice, it’s a way to express your passions. Jewelry, houses, expensive cars, the people who call themselves your friends, the people who happen to be your lovers—I’ve thrown it all away, at one time or another. Without a trace of regret. But do you know what I hate? I hate to lose things. Losing is an insult, it’s a kind of wound. A woman like me should never lose anything.”

  She glanced back at me, her cold eyes blazing. “I used to be completely different from the way I am now. Believe it or not, I was once a virtual child. Shy. Gullible. The Eel wasn’t like that, was she?”

  “No, not really. Though she was very young, too, of course. And innocent.”

  “I remember her innocence. Girls that age are just as innocent as daffodils, as mayflies. Me too, even though I thought I was completely sophisticated, what with going to bed with Spencer and jabbering away about ‘mind games.’ Mind games. Spencer should have met our campaign strategist, there’s someone who really knows how to play mind games!”

  She smiled, though not at us, and not with any warmth.

  “Funny, everything we do now is mind games, the point of which is nothing more than knowing how to keep score. There really isn’t anything else, once you have things figured out.”

  She tasted what she had said and found it sour enough to be accurate.

  “When did you figure things out? When you married your first husband? When you divorced him? When you became involved in politics?”

  Briefly, astonishingly, she gathered about her most of her old psychic and erotic force and with a movement of her shoulders and a dip of her head sent it toward me in a rush of heat and expectation. I wondered how this capacity would play itself out over a long campaign.

  “How do you think I married Luther Trilby? Standing in front of his limousine and batting my eyes? How do you think I stayed married to that disgusting psycho pig for twelve years?”

  “I see.” It was heartbreaking—none of the subsequent horror needed to have happened to her.

  “Do you?” she asked, voracious to the last.

  “Out there. In the meadow.”

  I had surprised her, and she did not enjoy surprises. Her face narrowed down around the smallest smile I had ever seen. “Maybe you’re not a total idiot. Donald would never have known the answer to that, would you, Donald?” She had to retaliate against someone, and Vardis Fleck was cowering in some secluded chamber.

  “I only know what I have to know,” Don said. He was unperturbed: Meredith Bright Trilby Walsh no longer had any power to injure him. They had worked through all of that decades earlier.

  “Why don’t I give you what you came for?” Meredith’s voice was flat and steely, and not at all feminine. “After all, that’s one of the things I’m supposed to be best at.”

  “Please,” I said, wondering at what she thought she excelled.

  | Meredith’s Version |

  You couldn’t begin with the ceremony in the meadow, you had to pick it up much earlier. Pigheaded and arrogant, Mallon had his little heart set on impressing his followers with the razzle-dazzle firework display he was hoping to whip up. Guys like Mallon devour adoration, they gulp down all the love in the room and then whine that there isn’t more. It’s always all about them, no matter what they say.

  And the more talented these guys tend to be, the more damage they cause.

  So before you even got to what happened on University Avenue and thereabouts, you had to hear about the early afternoon.

  That Sunday was a little rocky from the start. What with it being his big day and everything, Mallon was spooked. That he had a sort of premonition that this time all his work and study and mumbo-jumbo was going to pay off in some brand-new way made him even more anxious. The college students could be counted on to get to their rendezvous on time, but what about those goofy high-school kids? They bounced around like rubber balls, their terrible parents had no idea how to instill even a tiny bit of discipline in their children. The only reason they made it to most of their classes was that they moved from room to room in lockstep, apart of course from days when they all ducked through the exits and fell out of windows and boogied on outta there.

  To guarantee their participation in his ritual, Mallon ordered the kids to meet him on the south side of the state capitol at noon, and wonder of wonders, such was their devotion they showed up. He marched them off to the old movie theater on the square, bought them tickets to The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming!, escorted them up to the counter and let them order all the candy, popcorn, and soft drinks they wanted, led them to an empty row, and ordered them to sit down and pig out on their candy. Twizzlers and Good & Plenty for lunch, weren’t they lucky? They were to sit through the movie twice, then come out. He would be waiting on the sidewalk, and they’d all walk together to meet the others on University Avenue.

  Mallon sat through the hilarious and amazing performance of the theater organist on the great Wurlitzer that floated up from the orchestra pit. The kids cracked up at the way the little bald man flapped his rubbery arms and bowed and swayed while the huge organ mooed and brayed so loudly the walls and the floor vibrated, and when the still-flailing little bald man sank again beneath the level of the stage and the lights dimmed and the curtain rose (all of which the guru himself described to Meredith once they finally got back on track) the great man told the eager kiddies that he had details to take care of, but he’d see them outside in less than four hours. Enjoy the movie!

  At which point he rushed out of the theater and with his cock undoubtedly pounding in his moleskin trousers ran right away over to Meredith Bright’s apartment on Johnson Street, where he attempted to tranquilize his ever-building anxieties by shedding his clothes and pulling her into her bed. Not that she put up much of a fight. Mallon was then, still and for a little while more, her adored, her mentor, her Master. An excess of tension made him ejaculate too quickly, and Meredith was still such a baby that she blamed herself. As a result, sh
e roused him into a second, far more successful romp, after which he dropped into sleep so profound he drooled on her pillow. Ah, Maestro!

  He slept, she stroked his beautiful hair, and read more of Love’s Body. Twice fucked, Meredith learned that documents create an inherent contradiction between fetishism and magic that leads naturally to thoughts of prefiguration and the recognition that nothing ever, ever happens for the first time. As everything keeps on recurring in an eternal revolution, renewals—like Spencer’s!—take place again and again, throughout time. When her lover stretched and smacked his lips, she did her best to effect a second renewal, but Spencer, who was at his most leonine, his cock its most silken and pendulous, his chest its broadest and most manly, his hands their most shapely, thrust aside her willingness and announced that he had to get something to eat before meeting the kids at the end of the second screening of The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming! Sorry, the Master was having one of those I-have-to-be-alone moments, those my-soul-is-mine-alone-and-must-remain-so spells, always enchanting when used against other people.

  Left alone, she thought her apartment looked asprawl and unkempt. Without Spencer breathing softly in her bed, Love’s Body was just little heaps of disconnected sentences. Meredith tossed the book onto a chair. A thrill of distaste prompted her to lean over and flick it to the floor. She tried the TV but found only soap operas, which were far too much like her actual life to be watchable, though some of the actors were extremely cute. (Meredith Bright had never suffered a coma or amnesia, nor had she discovered the existence of an evil twin, but there always seemed to be way too much drama going on: boys prostrated themselves before her at least three times a year, boys thought they were being irresistibly original when they strummed guitars beneath her window, boys went crazy right in front of her, and to tell the truth so did girls, often, in one way or another. And as for her parents, forget about it, they even looked like the old standbys and authority figures on soaps: corporate CEOs, police commissioners, high-ranking medical staff, and beautiful but treacherous grandparents.) Eventually, she faced up to the nullity of her existence and wandered out to take her time getting to the rendezvous point.

  She had gone only a little way off State Street when she began to hear the sorts of noises that she associated with antiwar protests and civil unrest.

  Secretly, Meredith didn’t even like the word dissent. The facts it called forth into the world made her almost ill with revulsion—so messy, so disorderly, so violent! Only when she was irritated with Spencer Mallon could she admit to herself how profoundly uninterested she was in Vietnam, in the whole depressing topic of Negro rights. In Arkansas, almost nobody she knew became rabid on these subjects; why were people so unreasonable in Madison? Why couldn’t they just let things sort themselves out, the way things always did?

  Voices distorted through bullhorns, voices raised in chants, police sirens, mob sounds, the sounds of booted feet striking the pavement, all of this signaled the nearby presence of chaos she could almost smell without being able to see. Meredith tried to cut around it, wherever it was, while thinking that Mallon was going to love this uproar, he would take it as a sign!

  For a while she worked her way west, trying to identify where all the trouble was without actually encountering it. The protest, the demonstration had obviously begun elsewhere than the library plaza between State and Langdon, the usual site of political unrest, though to be honest protests and demonstrations, pickets, petition signings, teach-ins, and strikes took place all over the campus and its surroundings. You never knew where you were going to run into a guy with a megaphone, a sullen mob blocking access to a classroom building, ranks of angry-looking cops facing down boys with beards, and girls spinning around in leotards and Danskins. Or cops on horseback like overseers staring down at a line made up of white Wisconsin hippies in denim jackets and young black men in leather and sunglasses, all of them linking arms and swaying in what she took to be an artificial ecstasy.

  After another block, she finally began to notice, then to put together, the evidence of what had taken place. Crumpled and torn posters and leaflets littered both the pavement and the street she could see when she looked one block north. Splintered wood, too, from a table or a sawhorse. Items of clothing lay here and there amongst the scattered papers—T-shirts, sweatshirts, sneakers. Meredith picked up speed, knowing that she was jogging toward confusion and violence. The shouts and uproar grew louder as she moved toward the next intersection, which happened to be one block east of their rendezvous point, the corner of University Avenue and North Charter Street. Then a little crowd of young people, perhaps half a dozen, came bursting into the intersection before her, running hard. Some of them wept as they ran. One of the boys had wound a shirt around his head, and a circular bloodstain blossomed on the shirt. She shouted a question at the running students, but they ignored her in their flight.

  The police had attempted to shut down an off-campus demonstration, a take-it-to-the-people effort she could faintly remember having heard about. Instead of yielding or disbanding, the crowd of demonstrators had moved their protest down the street, causing the police to charge, in turn causing the students to run westward down University with the cops coming after them, waving nightsticks. The din coming from the precise place where her group was scheduled to meet filled Meredith with fear and disgust, revulsion and panic. None of her many instincts encouraged her to move toward the corner of University and North Charter, but when she came at last to North Charter, and the appalling din assailed her, she took her courage in both hands, turned north, and made her way through students racing the other way.

  It was a stunning chaos. An extraordinary litter covered the street, bags of garbage, long streamers torn from banners, bottles, beer cans, torn books, broken bits of wood. All of it was in motion. Some of what appeared to be garbage was, when looked at closely, human bodies around which students with flowing hair and bell-bottom jeans stood their ground and bellowed at enraged policemen in science-fiction protective helmets with face guards, who bellowed back, their nightsticks raised. The young people lying in the street had fallen, toppled by either a blow from a policeman or a push from someone in a tearing hurry, and were struggling to creep away unnoticed. Cops with faces exposed strode amidst the carnage, plucking kids off the street and propelling them into black vans with ruthless mechanical efficiency.

  For a second, Meredith caught sight of Hayward and Milstrap on the other side of University Avenue, staring with huge eyes at the pandemonium before them. A huge cop on a monumental black horse rode across the scene with his nightstick raised like a sword, scattering kids like windblown confetti. At the far end of the intersection, he wheeled around and came sweeping back again, putting a definitive end to most of the remaining resistance. In his wake, Meredith looked again across the Avenue and saw that Hayward and his roommate were staring at her and making hand signals to stay where she was, they would work their way toward her.

  “There was a huge student protest that turned into a riot on that same day?” I burst out. “How come this is the first I ever heard of it?”

  “Hell, man,” Olson put in, “there were protests and demonstrations and riots all over the place in those days. It just slowed us down a little. No big deal. Even the Capital Times didn’t say much about it. Like two paragraphs.”

  “Because the Cap Times wanted to downplay everything antiwar, don’t you get it? You guys were in such a bubble, you didn’t notice that things were falling apart all around us, and you didn’t care that we wound up being way, way off schedule!”

  “What schedule?” Olson looked genuinely puzzled.

  “Aah! Why do I put up with you?” Meredith yelled. A door opened, and Vardis Fleck’s gleaming head poked through the gap. His mistress waved him away.

  I remembered a detail from my wife’s grudging accounts of the days spent under Mallon’s spell before the rite in the meadow.

  “Yes, the schedule,” I said.


  Meredith Walsh swung her tight, furious face toward me and drilled me with an unspoken question.

  “You’re talking about the time frame you developed by doing a horoscope of the group. You were supposed to begin by … I don’t remember. Seven-twenty?”

  “Exactly,” she said. “Donald, do you remember? He did, and he wasn’t even there! Do you know how much work it is, to work up a star chart and do a horoscope? I did that for free, I did it out of love, and none of you little jackasses took it seriously!”

  “Hey, things happened,” Olson said. “You gotta go with the flow.”

  “No, you don’t. We were held up by a good ninety minutes, maybe more. By then, things had changed. We weren’t in the optimum position for success anymore. We should have bagged it, we should have called a rain date. We should have gone home to our hovels and waited until I could work out the next time we’d have a chance of success.”

  “A lousy hour and a half,” Don said.

  “Even an hour makes a difference, Don.”

  “Spencer had some doubts about that, you know.”

  “To his sorrow,” she said.

  When the group finally reunited, Mallon refused to listen to her. Well, he didn’t actually refuse, he just dismissed her worries and ignored her advice. He blew her off, was what he did. The actual situation, the one he should have known enough to care about, was that by the time they assembled in the wreckage and puddles left behind by the cops and the demonstrators, it was past eight-thirty, and the light was going fast. All of her calculations had been thrown off, and from what she remembered of the astrological signs, from here on out things looked pretty grim. If you missed the window that had just slammed shut, it was best to wait a couple of days. That was how she interpreted the chart, anyhow. But as they stood and talked about it on a water-darkened sidewalk covered with soaked, pulpy leaflets, Meredith understood that her warnings meant nothing to Spencer. He was in forward gear, and he was going to stay that way.