A Dark Matter: A Novel

by Peter Straub

  Eighteen hours later, a suspicious groundskeeper found him in a welter of faded gum wrappers and cigarette packs, dusty old condoms, and broken half-pint bottles beneath the bleachers at Camp Randall Stadium. He had no memory of covering the considerable distance between the agronomy meadow and the football stadium, and in fact had possessed only a very general idea of the stadium’s location. It seemed likely that in a blind search for shelter he had come upon it by accident, and entered the structure without any recognition of its function. When the groundskeeper prodded his shoulder and told him that whatever the hell he was up to, he sure as hell had to get out of there now, Hootie blinked and quoted Hawthorne to the effect that by sticking to the shadowy bypaths he was going to keep himself simple and childlike, with a freshness, and a fragrance, and a dewy purity of thought.

  The stadium’s groundskeeper dragged him into the office and called the city police.

  A little after six o’clock, Don and I returned to the Concourse and stopped off at our rooms for a few minutes before meeting again in the lounge. During the business of greeting Don at the bar when he walked in, ordering a glass of wine, spending a minute gabbing with the bartender, and taking our drinks down the length of the room to reclaim our little round table, I gave the half smiles and anticipatory glances that indicated I was suppressing, with some difficulty, vital new information.

  We sat, and Don said, “You’d better tell me, or you’ll burst.”

  “I know, I know,” I said. “It’s like the ultimate coincidence. You’re not going to believe it.”

  “I already don’t.”

  “But you will.” I hesitated for a moment. “There was a message on my room phone. It was from Boats. He called my house, and my assistant, who just got back from Italy, told him where we were. Do you care to guess where Jason Boatman is living now?”

  “Sure,” Don said. “Madison, come to think of it. In his little hideout.”

  “He might have moved. These days, Jason lives about ten to fifteen minutes away by car. On the east side, in the Willy Street area, whatever that is. He says he has big news, and he wants to tell us in person.”

  “How did he sound?”

  “He sounded … I’d have to say … he sounded happy.”

  “That is big news,” Don said. “How did he know we were here? How did he know where we were staying?”

  “That’s what I asked him. But when you think about it, there’s only one way he could have learned about us.”

  “You mean … the Eel called him? Well, why should I be surprised? She called me, didn’t she?”

  “I guess she e-mailed him,” I said, and added that I had never realized the extent to which she kept in touch.

  “You really don’t get it, do you?” he asked.

  Boatman’s directions brought us to a wide two-story frame house on Morrison Street. It may not have been beautiful, but it certainly was no mere hideout. A tilting walkway of cracked pavement led to three wooden steps and a long front porch in need of a sanding, some screening, and several new coats of paint. The entire house, once a nice, leafy shade of green, now looked a bit jaundiced. Limp, dying ferns drooped across the cement facing on both sides of the steps. On the right side of the house, a tire-track driveway led to a garage that appeared to be trembling on the lip of collapse. Opposite the house, on the other side of Morrison Street, an overgrown bluff dropped fifteen or twenty feet to the shore of Lake Monona. This structure and its neighbors, in fact the entire neighborhood, I supposed, had declined from an original middle-class respectability to the steady deterioration of student housing. In need of a small income, a widow or a single mother had rented a couple of rooms to graduate students—the area was too distant from the campus for undergraduates—and eventually thousands had followed, burrowing into the houses while they established food co-ops, homeopathic storefronts, acupuncture centers, bad ethnic restaurants, health food stores, and cafés with cute names. What was Jason Boatman doing in a place like this?

  We picked our way over the broken paving stones, went up the few steps, and pressed the bell alongside the screen door. Soon, the door to the porch swung open, for a moment exposing the dark silhouette, blurred by the mesh of the screen, of an ample, grandfatherly figure. The figure moved forward and reached for the handle of the screen door, in the process emerging far enough into the evening light to be revealed as Jason Boatman. He was smiling, and for both Donald Olson and me, the ease and friendliness of the smile indicated that some central element in the man had left him. A fire had gone out. He was too relaxed to be Jason Boatman, also he was too old and too fat: only a few gray hairs were swept back over his scalp, harsh lines sectioned his alarmingly pale face, and he had grown a small but distinct belly that rolled through the world before him.

  As he swung open the dusty screen door, he said, “Hey, guys, it’s great to see you! Come on in, willya?”

  Even this did not seem like the Jason Boatman of old, who had been tense and often morose. The old Jason would have said something like “Okay, you’re here. Finally.”

  Before passing through onto the porch, Olson gave me a look that said, What’s with this guy, and what did he do with the real Boats?

  “God, you’re both here together, this is great.” Exuding affability instead of anxiety, Boatman stepped over to his front door and thrust it open, making a sort of “at your leave, gentlemen” gesture with a sweep of his free arm. “Inside, my friends, inside. Welcome to my castle.”

  The door led directly into a large living room where a row of coat hooks and a section of floor tiles marked off an entry area. Beyond was a hallway to a series of smaller chambers that separated off from the big room itself, where comfortable old brown furniture sagged around a wooden coffee table. A big-screen television took up much of the front wall. Dark wooden bookshelves empty of anything but a few CDs and some small figurines and a few hand-thrown pots covered the wall to the right and the half wall separating the living room from the dining area and the kitchen. Despite its large front windows, the living room, where Jason beckoned us toward his sofa and chairs, was permanently darkened by the porch roof, which blocked the sunlight.

  “Siddown, siddown, guys. Geez, I can’t believe I got the two of you. What are you, both staying at the Concourse?”

  “Yep,” Don said. “We came here to spend some time with Hootie.”

  “Yeah, I think she told me that.” Jason slipped into a chair to the side of the coffee table, again indicating the sofa, then, before I could speak, almost immediately bounced back up. “Boy, what happened to my manners? You guys like anything to drink? It’s around that time, isn’t it? I got some beer in the fridge, some vodka, that’s about it.”

  Both of us asked for vodka. “If you have enough,” I said. “If not, beer is fine. It’s great that Lee e-mailed you, and that we can get together like this. I didn’t know she stayed in touch.”

  “She doesn’t, not really. I get an e-mail once a year, maybe. The Eel could always figure out where I was, I don’t know how. Don’t worry about the vodka, I have plenty. I’m gonna have me a beer, though.”

  We settled onto his sofa, and he took two steps toward the back of the house and his kitchen. “So how is Hootie, anyhow? You know, it never occurred to me to visit him out there. I thought he couldn’t talk, or something.”

  “That’s not quite right,” I said, and explained Howard Bly’s former communication technique. “But now, he doesn’t have to quote Hawthorne anymore. Because he has one of those freak memories, every sentence, every word of everything he ever read is available to him, and he can combine them in any way he likes. So he has complete verbal freedom, really. And I think he fakes it about half the time—I think he just speaks, and pretends he’s quoting something.”

  “But that’s a huge breakthrough. I guess I could visit him, too, couldn’t I?”

  “Sure you could,” Don said. “But you’d better act pretty fast. Chances are, before the end of the year he’ll mo
ve into a treatment center in Chicago.”

  “Holy moly. Did you guys have something to do with this?”

  We looked at each other, and I said, “We did have a positive effect on him, you’d have to say. I’m really glad we went to the Lamont, and I’m sure Don is, too.”

  “Absolutely,” said Don.

  “Big changes all over the place,” Jason said. “Kind of makes you wonder. Anyhow, I’ll be right back with your drinks, guys.”

  We could hear him rattling ice cubes and putting glasses on the counter and doing other things in his kitchen. While all this was going on, I realized two things about this other old friend from my high-school years. The first was that the most rootless and unmoored of all my old friends, more homeless even than Donald Olson, had settled down. Olson had at least often shared accommodations with his followers, but Boatman had shifted from one dingy hotel room to another.

  The other recognition that came to me was that I had been right: something had gone from Boats, and that quality was passion. In our high-school years, we had all been passionate about a great many things, our music, sports, our books, politics, each other, our mostly awful parents … Spencer Mallon! But Jason Boatman’s passion had been made chiefly of anger. His needs had been unassuageable, his hungers beyond fulfillment, his desires all forced inward, where they could not be met. At least to people his own age, the magnitude of his suffering had made him appealing. (We were young, is all I can say.) His passionate anger had left Boatman, and the results had been entirely beneficial. The only drawback was that Boats now threatened to be an overstuffed bore.

  Jason came out of the kitchen and skirted his dining room table, holding just above the bulge of his paunch an oval metal tray with three glasses, a bottle of Budweiser, and two small bowls. When he set the bowls on the coffee table, we saw that one contained black, shiny Greek olives and the other roasted peanuts and cashews. Boatman shopped at the students’ health food store; maybe he even belonged to a food co-op!

  “Figured we should have some goodies,” he said, and raised his beer bottle. “To your good health, gentlemen!”

  We mumbled reciprocities and sipped from our brimming glasses.

  “This is real nice,” Boatman said. “You know, Lee, there were times I thought about seeing you, maybe, talking to you, having a little get-together, a little reunion. I thought about that. It went through my mind.”

  “Why didn’t you do anything about it?”

  “Well, for one thing, until we ran into each other in Milwaukee that time, I didn’t know how to get in touch with you. I mean, you’re not listed in any phone books, are you?”

  “No, but there are lots of publishing and writers’ directories that have my address or my agent’s. Some of them have my telephone number. You could have looked me up in Who’s Who. That’s got everything.”

  “People like you are in Who’s Who. People like me don’t even know where to find one. What does it look like, anyhow?”

  “Like a fat, red, two-volume encyclopedia.”

  “I never as much as laid eyes on a copy of that.”

  “You might have tried the local library. But look, Boats, when I gave you my card, didn’t I say you could call me anytime you felt like it?”

  “Sure, but I didn’t think you meant it. And there was the other problem. Before that time, the I last time saw you, you and the Eel were getting ready to drive to New York for college and all that. Since then, you got famous. You had your face on the cover of Time! And you made all kinds of money! Why would anyone like that want to talk to someone like me? Man, when I thought about you, I got intimidated.”

  “I wish you hadn’t.” In my secret heart, however, I was not entirely unhappy that Boats had been too intimidated to approach me. Then something else occurred to me. “Anyhow, you had my phone number from Lee, didn’t you? You just didn’t want to use it.”

  “No. The Eel never gave me your number, only your address. I never wrote her any letters, though.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Why? She didn’t want me to.” He said this as though it should have been obvious, even to a dullard like me.

  Jason turned to Don Olson, “How did you find him?”

  “I was in the joint. Lots of times, prison libraries have those writers’ directories. It didn’t have his phone number or anything, but it had his agent’s address. So I wrote the agent, and he called Lee, I guess, and Lee said, ‘Yeah the guy is legit,’ and the agent wrote back to me with all the info. And that was that.”

  “Well, I’m glad I could do it today, man. And you guys probably don’t even know that I went straight like five, six years ago.”

  “You went straight?” Don said. “Amazing.”

  “I got sick of stealing shit, and I started to get the feeling that my perfect record was going to get broken pretty soon. So I gave myself a little test.”

  “What kind of test?” I asked.

  “I went to a little shop and tried to lift a stapler, because my old one broke. I almost got caught. If I hadn’t seen the manager staring in at me through the window, I would have been caught. And that was how I learned I needed another line of work.”

  Boatman explained that after a short period of misery spent casting around for ideas and reading the want ads, he realized that he possessed only a single marketable skill. Surely he could earn an income demonstrating to chain store owners and managers of warehouses and retail outlets how to keep people like Jason Boatman from stealing whatever they liked whenever they felt like it. He could show people how to plug up the holes through which he and those like him had crawled, sometimes literally.

  “So that’s what happened,” Boatman said. “I started down at the university co-op. Told the manager, Stand there and watch me. You won’t goddamned believe what you’re going to see. I park him on the second floor near the registers, remind him to watch me carefully, and I go into business mode. He keeps his eye on me while I mooch around, pick stuff up, and lay it down again. I have a backpack, but it doesn’t look like I’m putting anything in it. Fifteen minutes later, I come up to the guy and say, Well?

  “Well what? he says. You didn’t do anything.

  “That’s real interesting, I said, seeing as I just swiped about five hundred bucks worth of your shit. At which point I unload my pockets and take stuff out from under my shirt and out of my pants, out of my socks, out of my shoes, and finally, out of the backpack. Art books, accounting textbooks, fountain pens, Badger scarves, Badger desk diaries, a Badger lamp, halogen bulbs, you name it, out it goes onto the counter. Maybe I didn’t have the Spencer Mallon magical voodoo cloak over me anymore, but nobody could say I wasn’t a good thief.

  “Jesus, the guy says. You stole all that right under my eyes?

  “I didn’t steal any of it, I said. I just showed you I could. In the old days, now, many times I walked out of this store with twice what’s in front of you right there, starting I think three managers back and going on right up to you. And while I was robbing your eyeteeth out of your head, I saw two kids doing the same as me only not as good. Also, one of your cashiers is getting hinky with the cash drawer.

  “Then I showed him what I was talking about. We scared two little book thieves out of the shelves, and twenty minutes later, the creep doing the register scam is on his way to a holding cell, and I have a new job at six hundred dollars a week. The manager is so happy with me, he writes a letter of recommendation that gets me consultant work at a warehouse and a grocery chain, and now I’m the president of It Takes A Thief, Inc.

  “So what are you working on now?” Boatman asked me. The most innocent of all questions, the least answerable, the words people utter to writers when they barely know them and have no idea what to say to such odd creatures. “If you can talk about it, that is,” Boatman added, redeeming himself.

  What to say, how to respond? I chose to offer a simple, pared-down version of what felt like the truth. “For a while, I thought about writing a
nonfiction book about those Ladykiller murders in Milwaukee. Then I tried to work on a new novel. It went really slowly. Finally, something happened that sort of brought Hootie back to me, and my whole past sort of flooded back to me. Whatever happened in that meadow seemed so crucial to all of us, that I had to work it out. I had to see into it. You know? I had been so left out, which is something I did to myself, granted, but for some reason I couldn’t take it anymore.

  “Right at that time, Don showed up, freshly sprung from the jug. My wife pretty much arranged that, too. We agreed that he could stay with me for a while, long enough to get himself together, if he told me whatever he could remember about that day. About Mallon in general.”

  I blinked. I took a swallow of my drink. These actions felt faintly robotic. “And Don was really helpful. He made it possible for me to talk to the former Meredith Bright.”

  “Oh, God,” Boatman said. “I can still get a little starry-eyed, thinking about Meredith Bright.”

  “Make sure you never meet her again,” I said. “Or if you do, cut the encounter as short as you can. And yet, she still makes a terrific first impression.”

  “She told you what she remembered, from back then?”

  “In detail,” I said.

  “And Hootie, too?”

  “He had some interesting things to say.”