The Weird

by Ann

  I cannot leave my room now. Beside me a screen dances with colored lights that refract and explode in brilliant parhelions when I dream. But I am not alone now, ever…

  I see him waiting in the corner, laughing as his green eyes slip between the branches and the bars of my window, until the sunlight changes and he is lost to view once more, among the dappled and chattering leaves.

  Family

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Joyce Carol Oates (1938–) is an American author who has published over fifty novels, as well as many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novel them (1969) won the National Book Award, and her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000) were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. In addition to portraying compelling, complex characters, Oates excels at writing stories with a New Gothic or weird sensibility, many of them terrifying or disturbing. ‘Family’ (1989) is a tale of weird science fiction horror and strange ritual that reads like the love-child of Shirley Jackson and China Miéville.

  The days were brief and attenuated and the season appeared to be fixed – neither summer nor winter, spring nor fall. A thermal haze of inexpressible sweetness, though bearing tiny bits of grit or mica, had eased into the Valley from the industrial region to the north and there were nights when the sun set at the western horizon as if it were sinking through a porous red mass, and there were days when a hard-glaring moon like bone remained fixed in a single position, prominent in the sky. Above the patchwork of excavated land bordering our property – all of which had formerly been our property in Grandfather’s time: thousands of acres of wheat, corn, oats, and open grazing land – a curious trembling rainbow sometimes defined itself, its colors shifting even as you stared, shades of blue, blue-green, blue-purple, orange, orange-red, orange-yellow, a translucent yellow that dissolved into mere moisture as the thermal breeze stirred, warm as an exhaled breath. And if you had run to tell others of the rainbow it was likely to be gone when they came. ‘Liar,’ my older brothers and sisters said, ‘don’t say such things if you don’t mean them!’ Father said, frowning, ‘Don’t say such things at all if you aren’t certain they will be true for others, not simply for yourself.’

  This begins in the time of family celebration – after Father succeeded in selling all but a few of the acres of land surrounding our house, his inheritance from Grandfather, and he and Mother were giddy as children with relief at having escaped the luckless fate of certain of our neighbors in the Valley, rancher-rivals of Grandfather’s and their descendants, who had sold off their property years ago, before the market had begun to realize its full potential. (Full potential were words that Father often uttered, rolling the words about in his mouth like round, smooth stones whose taste absorbed him.) Now they were landless, and their investments were shaky and they had made their homes in cities of increasing inhospitality, where no country people could endure to live for long. They had virtually prostituted themselves, Father said, sighing, and smiling – and for so little! It was a saying of Grandfather’s that a curse would befall anyone in the Valley who gloated over a neighbor’s misfortune, but as Father said, it was damned difficult not to feel superior in this instance. And Mother vehemently agreed.

  Our house was made of stone, stucco, and clapboard; the newer wings, designed by a big-city architect, had a good deal of glass, and looked out into the Valley, where on good days we could see for many miles while on humid hazy days we could see barely beyond the fence that marked the edge of our property. Father, however, preferred the roof: In his white, light-woolen three-piece suit, white fedora cocked back on his head, for luck, he spent many of his waking hours on the highest peak of the highest roof of the house, observing, through binoculars, the amazing progress of construction in the Valley – for overnight, it seemed, there appeared roads, expressways, sewers, drainage pipes, ‘planned’ communities with such names as Whispering Glades, Murmuring Oaks, Pheasant Run, Deer Willow, all of them walled to keep out intruders, and, yet more astonishing, towerlike buildings of aluminum and glass and steel and brick, buildings whose windows shone and winked like mirrors, splendid in sunshine like pillars of flame; such beauty where once there had been mere earth and sky, it caught at your throat like a great bird’s talons, taking your breath away. ‘The ways of beauty are as a honeycomb,’ Father told us, and none of us could determine, staring at his slow-moving lips, whether the truth he spoke was a happy truth or not, whether even it was truth.

  So mesmerized was Father by the transformation of the Valley, perceived with dreamlike acuity through the twin lenses of his binoculars, the poor man often forgot where he was; failed to come down for dinner, or for bed; and if Mother, thinking to indulge him, or hurt by his indifference to her, did not send one of the servants to summon him, he was likely to spend the entire night on the roof…and in the morning, smiling sheepishly, he would explain that he’d fallen asleep, or, conversely, that he had been troubled by having seen things for which he could not account – shadows the size of longhorns moving beyond our twelve-foot barbed-wire fence, and mysterious winking lights fifty miles away in the foothills. Mother dismissed the shadows as optical illusions caused by father’s overwrought constitution, or the ghosts of old, long-since-slaughtered livestock; the lights, she said, were surely from the private airport at Furnace Creek – had Father forgotten already that he’d sold a large parcel of land for a small airport there? ‘These lights more resemble fires,’ Father said stubbornly. ‘And they were in the foothills, not in the plain.’

  There were times then of power failures, and financial losses, and Father was forced to give up nearly all of our servants, but he retained his rooftop vigil, white-clad, powerful lenses to his eyes, for he perceived himself as a witness and thought, should he live to a ripe old age, as Grandfather had (Grandfather was in his ninety-ninth year when he died, and then in a fall from a wasp-stung horse), he would be a chronicler of our time, like Thucydides of his, for ‘Is there a world struggling to be born, or only struggle?’

  Because of numerous dislocations in the Valley, of which we learned by degrees, the abandonment of houses, farms, livestock, even pets, it happened that packs of dogs began to roam about looking for food, particularly by night, poor starveling creatures that were becoming a nuisance in the region and should be, as authorities urged, shot down on sight – these dogs being not feral by birth of course but formerly domesticated terriers, setters, cocker spaniels, German shepherds, Labrador retrievers, even the larger and coarser breed of poodle – and it was the cause of some friction between Mother and Father that, despite his presence on the roof at all hours of the day and night, Father failed nonetheless to see a band of dogs dig beneath our fence and silently make their way to the dairy barn, where with terrifying efficiency they tore out the throats – and surely this could not have been in silence! – of our last six holsteins, and our last two she-goats, preparatory to devouring the poor creatures; nor did Father notice anything out of the ordinary on the night that two homeless derelicts, formerly farmhands of ours, impaled themselves on the fence (which was electrically charged, though in compliance with County Farm and Home Office regulations) and were found, dead, in the morning. (It was Kit, our sixteen-year-old, who found them, and the sight of the men, he said, tore his heart – so skinny, gray, grizzled, he scarcely recognized them. And the crows had been at them early.)

  Following this episode Father journeyed to the state capital, with the purpose of taking out a loan, and reestablishing, as he called it, old ties with his politician friends, and Mother joined him a few days later for a greatly needed change of scene, as she said – ‘Not that I don’t love you all, and the farm, but I need to breathe other air for a while’ – leaving us under the care of Mrs. Hoyt our housekeeper and our eldest sister, Cory. The decision to leave us at this time was not a judicious one: Mother had forgotten that Mrs. Hoyt was in poor health, or perhaps she had decided not to care; and she seemed ignorant of the fact that Cory, for all the in
nocence of her marigold eyes and melodic voice, was desperately in love with one of the National Guardsmen who patrolled the Valley in jeeps, authorized to shoot wild dogs and, upon certain occasions, vandals, would-be arsonists, and squatters who were deemed a threat to the public well-being. And when Mother returned, unaccompanied by Father, after what seemed to us a very long absence (two weeks? two months?) it was with shocking news: She and Father had, after heart-searching deliberation, decided that, for the good of all concerned, they must separate – they must officially dissolve the marriage bond. Mother’s voice wavered as she spoke but fierce little pinpoints of light shone in her eyes. We children were so taken by surprise we could not speak at first. Separate! Dissolve! For the good of all! We stood staring and mute; not even Cory, Kit, and Dale, not even Lona, who was the most impulsive of us, found words with which to protest; the youngest children began whimpering helplessly, soon joined by the rest – and by our few remaining servants; and Mrs. Hoyt, whose features were already bloated by illness. Mother said, ‘Don’t! Please! I can hardly bear the pain myself!’ She then played a video of Father’s farewell to the family, which drew fresh tears…for there, suddenly framed on our television screen, where we had never seen his image before, and could not in our wildest fancies have imagined it, was Father, somberly dressed, his hair in thin steely bands combed wetly across the dome of his skull, and his eyes puffy, an unnatural sheen to his face as if it had been scoured hard. He sat stiffly erect in a chair with a high ornately carved back; his fingers were gripping the arms so tightly the blood had drained from his knuckles; his words were slow, halting, and faint, like the progress of a gut-shot deer across a field, but unmistakably his: Dear children your mother and I after thirty years of marriage…very happy marriage have decided to…have decided to…have decided to… One of the low-flying helicopters belonging to the National Guardsmen soared past the house, making the television screen shudder, but the sound seemed to be garbled in any case, as if the tape had been clumsily cut and spliced; there were miniature lightning flashes; and Father’s clear face turned liquid, melting horizontally, his eyes long and narrow as slugs and his mouth distended like a drowning man’s; and all we could hear were sounds, not words, resembling Help me or I am innocent or I love you dear children – and then the screen was dead.

  That afternoon Mother introduced us to the man who was to be Father’s successor in the household, and to his three children, who were to be our new brothers and sister, and we shook hands shyly, in a state of mutual shock, and regarded one another with wide staring eyes. Our new Father! Our new brothers and sister! As Mother explained patiently her new husband was no stepfather but a genuine father; which meant that we were to call him ‘Father’ at all times, and even, in our most private innermost thoughts, we were to think of him as ‘Father’: for otherwise he would be very hurt, and very displeased. And so too with Einar and Erastus, our new brothers (not stepbrothers), and Fifi, our new sister (not stepsister).

  Our new Father stood before us beaming, a man of our former Father’s approximate age but heavier and more robust than that Father, with an unusually large head, the cranium particularly developed, and small shrewd quick-darting eyes beneath brows of bone. He wore a fashionably tailored suit so dark as to resemble an undertaker’s, and sported a red carnation in his lapel; his black shoes shone so splendidly they might have been phosphorescent. ‘Hello Father,’ we murmured, hardly daring to raise our eyes to his. ‘Hello Father.’ ‘Hello…’ The man’s jaws were elongated, the lower jaw a good inch longer than the upper, so that a wet malevolent ridge of teeth was revealed; and, as often happened in those days, a single thought shot like lightning among us children, from one to the other to the other to the other, each of us smiling guiltily as it struck us; Crocodile! Only little Jori burst into tears when the thought passed into her head and after an embarrassed moment our new Father stooped to pick her up in his arms and comfort her…and some of us could virtually see how the memory of our former Father passed from her, as cruelly as if it had been hosed out of her skull. She was three years old then, and not accountable for her behavior.

  New Father’s children were tall, big-boned, solemn, with a greenish peevish cast to their skin, like many city children; the boys had inherited their father’s large head and protruding crocodile jaws but the girl, Fifi, seventeen years old, was eye-catching in her beauty, with hair as mutinous as Cory’s, and wide-set brown eyes in which something wolfish glimmered.

  That evening certain of the boys – Dale, Kit, and Hewett – gathered close around Fifi, telling her wild tales of the Valley, how we had to protect ourselves with rifles and shotguns from trespassers, and how there was a resurgence of rats and other rodents on the farm, as a consequence of so much excavation in the countryside, and these tales, silly as they were, and exaggerated, made the girl shudder and giggle and lean toward the boys as if she were in need of their protection. And when Dale hurried off to get Fifi a goblet of ice water – at her request – she took the glass from his fingers and lifted it prissily to the light to examine its contents, asking, ‘Is this water pure? Is it safe to drink?’ It was true, our water was sometimes strangely effervescent, and tasted of rust; after a heavy rainfall there were likely to be tiny red wriggly things in it, like animated tails; so we had learned not to examine it too closely, and as our initial attacks of nausea, diarrhea, and faint-headedness had more or less subsided, we rarely thought of it any longer but tried to be grateful, as Mrs. Hoyt used to urge us, that we had any drinking water at all. So it was offensive to us to see Fifi make such a face, handing the goblet of water back to Dale, and asking him how anyone in his right mind could drink such – spilth. Dale said angrily, ‘How? This is how!’ and drank the water down in a single thirsty gulp. And he and his new sister stood staring at each other, each of them trembling with passion.

  As Cory observed smiling, yet with a trace of resentment or envy, ‘It looks as if “new sister” has made a conquest!’

  ‘But what will she do,’ I couldn’t help asking, ‘– if she can’t drink our water?’

  ‘She’ll drink it,’ Cory said grimly. ‘And she’ll find it delicious, like the rest of us.’ Which, of course, turned out very quickly to be true.

  Cory’s confinement came in a time of ever-increasing confusion…when there were frequent power failures in the Valley, and all foods except tinned goods were scarce, and the price of ammunition doubled, and quadrupled; and the sky by both day and night was criss-crossed by the contrails of unmarked bombers in a design both eerie and beautiful, like the web of a gigantic spider. By this time construction in most parts of the Valley had been halted, temporarily or indefinitely: Part-completed houses and high-rise office buildings punctuated the landscape; some were mere concrete foundations upon which girders had been erected, like exposed bone. The lovely ‘Mirror Tower’ – as we children called it: It must have had a real name – was a two-hundred-story patchwork of interlocking slots of reflecting glass with a pale turquoise tint, and where its elegant surface had once mirrored scenes of sparkling beauty there was now, from day to day, virtually nothing: a sky like soiled cotton batting, smoldering slag heaps, fantastic burdocks and thistles grown to the height of trees. Traffic had dwindled to a half-dozen diesel trucks per day hauling their massive cargo (much of it diseased livestock bound for northern slaughterhouses) and a very few passenger cars. There were cloverleafs that coiled endlessly upon themselves and elevated highways that broke off in midair, thus as authorities warned travelers you were in danger, if you ventured into the countryside, of being attacked by roaming gangs – but the rumor was that the most dangerous men were rogue Guardsmen who wore their uniforms inside out and preyed upon the very people they were paid to protect. None of the family left the compound without being well armed and of course the younger children no longer left at all. All schools, public and private, were temporarily shut down.

  The most luxurious of the model communities, known to us as The Wheel
– its original name was forgotten: Whispering Glades? Deer Willow? – had suffered so extreme a financial collapse that most of its services were said to be suspended, and many of its tenants had fled back to the cities from which they’d fled to the Valley. (The community was called The Wheel because its condominiums, office buildings, shops, schools, hospitals, and crematoria were arranged in spokes radiating outward from a single axis; and were protected at their twenty-mile circumference not by a visible wall, which the Japanese architect who had designed it had declared a vulgar and outmoded concept, but by a force field of electricity of lethal voltage.) Though the airport at Furnace Creek was officially closed, we often saw small aircraft taking off and landing there in the night, heard the insectlike whine of their engines and spied their winking red lights, and one night when the sun hung paralyzed at the horizon for several hours and visibility was poor though shot with a duplicitous sharpened clarity there was an airplane crash in a slag-heap area that had once been a grazing pasture for our cows, and some of the older boys insisted upon going out to investigate…returning with sober, stricken faces, and little to say of the sights they had seen except they wished they had not seen them. Miles away in the foothills were mysterious encampments, some of them mere camps, in which people lived and slept on the ground, others deliberately if crudely erected villages like those once displayed in museums as being the habitations of Native American peoples…the names of these ‘peoples’ long since forgotten. These were rumored to be unauthorized settlements of city dwellers who had fled their cities at the time of the general urban collapse, as well as former ranchers and their descendants, and various wanderers and evicted persons, criminals, the mentally ill, and victims of contagious diseases…all of these officially designated outlaw parties who were subject to harsh treatment by the Guardsmen, for the region was now under martial law, and only within compounds maintained by government-registered property owners and heads of families were civil rights, to a degree, still operative. Eagerly, we scanned the Valley for signs of life, passing among us a pair of binoculars like forbidden treasure whose original owner we could not recall – though Cory believed this person, an adult male, had lived with us before Father’s time, and had been good to us. But not even Cory could remember his name. Cory’s baby was born shortly after the funerals of two of the younger children, who had died of violent flulike illnesses, and of Uncle Darrah, who had died of shotgun wounds while driving his pick-up truck in the Valley; but this, we were assured by Mother and Father, was mere coincidence, and not to be taken as a sign. One by one we were led into the attic room set aside for Cory to stare in astonishment at the puppy-sized, red-faced, squalling, yet so wonderfully alive creature…with its large oval soft-looking head, its wizened angry features, its unblemished skin. Mother had found a cradle in the storage barn for the baby, a white wicker antique dating back to the previous century, perhaps a cradle she herself had used though she could not remember it, nor could any of us, her children, recall having slept in it; a piece of furniture too good for Cory’s ‘bastard child,’ as Mother tearfully called it. (Though allowing that the infant’s parentage was no fault of its own.) Fit punishment, Mother said, that Cory’s breasts yielded milk so grudgingly, and what milk they did yield was frequently threaded with blood, fit punishment for her daughter’s ‘sluttish’ behavior…but the family’s luck held and one day the older boys returned from a hunting expedition with a dairy cow…a beautiful black-and-white marbled animal very like the kind, years ago, or was it only months ago, we ourselves had owned. The cow supplied us with sweet, fresh, reasonably pure milk, thus saving Cory’s bastard infant’s life, as Mother said – ‘for whatever that life is worth.’