by Ben Dolnick
My plan had been to sleep on our old bare mattress in the caretaker’s apartment, but the room seemed somehow to be even colder than the rest of the house—I now remembered Hannah saying something about us needing to buy a space heater. So I wandered back out into the museum, a divining rod in search of warmth. Not the kitchen exhibit, not the entryway, not the living room. I creaked and shuffled my way up the stairs to the second floor, carrying my candle like a brimming bowl of soup. The top stair creaked and I nearly brained myself when I tripped on the landing. Not the storage room, not the children’s bedroom, not the exhibit room in which the cases stood empty and the wall signs still promised a look at Wright’s Famous Encyclopedias.
I’m not sure if it was my imagination or the warmth that overcomes a person at a certain point in his descent into delirium, but in Edmund and Sarah’s bedroom, finally, I thought I felt a type of cold that had a slightly less painful edge to it. I touched the bed, remembered the Styrofoam peanuts, and yanked off the period quilt, bringing with it a cloud of dust that I could taste. For a second I just stood there, my heart racing, the quilt heaped at my feet, and took in my situation. This is where you are. This is the moment to which your particular life has delivered you.
I curled up on the little hooked rug at the foot of the Wrights’ bed, using the quilt as mattress, blanket, and, thanks to some creative folding, pillow. I certainly wasn’t warm, but I was covered, which is the next best thing. I had set the candle on the floor next to my head, near enough that I could feel, or imagine that I was feeling, some of its heat. I didn’t want to blow it out yet, because I’d forgotten to bring the matches upstairs and I wasn’t ready to consign myself to a night of total darkness, so I just watched the flame wobble and limbo for a while. But I bolted awake after some number of minutes and realized that the only thing worse than being woken up by the police would be to be woken up by an inferno. So I blew the candle out, watched the wick tip fade, smelled birthday party. Dear God it was so dark. What did you do what am I doing what have I done. The only sound was the rain on the roof and a whispering I very much hoped was just blood rushing in my ears.
And this—despite my having resolved not to start in on my ghost work until the morning—was when the first mental channel slippage happened. The only way I can describe it is to say that at some point as I lay there, I started flickering into lives that weren’t mine. I was touching the iron railing of a bridge…and then I was back on the floor in the Wrights’ bedroom. I was leaning forward over a messy desk…and then I was myself again, panting under my quilt.
I don’t know how long I lay there, passing in and out of ordinary consciousness, but it was long enough for me to formulate a prayer: If this is anything like what Jim experienced, then I don’t think I’m ready for it. I may just have to die. At one point I sat upright, certain I’d heard a knocking on the wall by the closet. At another point I spent a good five minutes deliberating about whether to get up and pee. I felt increasingly aware, with each second that passed, of how little padding there was between my hip bones and the floor. I kept getting whiffs of mold or mildew or dead animal. The last coherent thought I remember having, before I finally sunk into an unrefreshing sleep, was: Am I, this trembling, hallucinating ball of sinew, really any stranger of a creature, any more improbable of an object, than a ghost?
[from Edmund Wright, The Encyclopedia of Ordinary Human Sensation, volume II: Pleasures, edited by Lydia Gibbens]
…
• The sudden stoppage of a meddlesome sound, viz. the newsboy’s shouts or a team of horses’ hooves.
• The near-certain knowledge, derived from certain atmospheric and behavioral clues, that one’s partner intends to fulfill the act of coitus.
• The sensation in one’s extremities when initially settling into bed, after a day that has been trying, whether physically or intellectually or emotionally or any combination thereof.
• The singing of a pure and muscular note, quite precisely inhabiting the pitch one intended.
• The minority of dreams, viz. dreams of hearing a most hilarious joke (which hilarity nearly invariably fails to translate into one’s waking senses); dreams in which one composes music, or speaks an unknown language, or in any other way demonstrates a heretofore unsuspected creative faculty; dreams of sexual fulfillment with a proper and intended partner; dreams of transformation, either of one’s own body or of external objects, into shapes that are both pleasing and contain the element of inevitability.
• The realization that one has, in the course of one’s researches, arrived at the moment when one’s fundamental question shall be answered imminently.
…
2
One of Hannah’s more durable and justified complaints about me, when we were together, was that I didn’t know how to look for things. I would, standing in front of a refrigerator featuring multiple bottles of mustard, insist that we were out. I would pillage the apartment in search of a pair of glasses that were resting on the edge of the bathroom sink.
Alone in the museum that next morning, I was determined to do better. I didn’t quite have Jim’s faith that Hannah had hidden her notebook in the house—it seemed just as likely to be at the bottom of Donna’s box, or at the bottom of the river—but my operating principle, at that point, was to do anything that had even the slightest chance of bringing me closer to her.
So I started out in the main parts of the house, dividing each room into quadrants like an archaeologist. This was, incidentally, a search conducted entirely with the curtains drawn, and with a good quarter of my attention absorbed in listening for tires on the driveway or footsteps on the porch. I was still wearing the loose white shirt and wool coat from the costume trunk. I looked under the carpets, inside drawers, underneath dressers. I lifted cushions from armchairs and took books off of shelves. I was, by the time I’d been at it for an hour or so, in that same state of desperation and mounting despair as if I’d been looking for my passport in the minutes before needing to leave for a trip. There was nothing but printer cartridges and dry pens in Hannah’s old office, nothing but broken-down shelving in the closet across from the stairs. In the storage room upstairs, underneath a stack of blank teacher evaluation forms, I found a torn piece of Wright House notepaper with Hannah’s handwriting on it—my blood briefly froze—but it was just an 845 phone number and the beginning of a shopping list. What had I been thinking? The museum was almost as cold now as it had been at night; I could feel my hopelessness—my sense of being fundamentally doomed and delusional—threatening to swallow me up. Fearing that you’ve lost your mind turns out to be no more romantic, and no easier to bear, than fearing that you have bowel cancer.
I spent most of that afternoon on the couch downstairs in the parlor, trying to convince myself that my ghost work might go better than my notebook hunting. Make yourself receptive, had been Jim’s instruction. Relax your muscles and turn your mind into an empty room. So I sat there watching the light change on the floorboards, pleading with Hannah to help me, feeling my face break into tears and then reassemble itself. How were you supposed to relax when every breeze sounded like a knock at the door and every inch of your body ached? How were you supposed to empty your mind when you couldn’t stop looking at the crack between the curtains? Hannah, I muttered, if what I’m doing has the slightest chance of succeeding, if I’m not just falling apart, please show me how, please show me something. But no one appeared and nothing happened. I only realized how long I’d been sitting there—and how easily I could have stayed sitting there forever—when I saw that the room was now dark enough that I was going to need another candle soon. Which meant that it had been more than twenty-four hours since I’d eaten a real meal.
I considered, briefly, breaking into a neighbor’s house—maybe the family down Culver with the softball tee—and emptying out their fridge. Or maybe walking back into town, seeing what I could steal from the bins by the farm stand. The plan I eventually settled on, though—and I
can’t vouch for my decision-making in this period—was to see if I could find anything edible in the museum’s garden. I’d seen Hannah pull up some knobby little carrots once, and I remembered watching her plant some knuckle-sized potato pieces at some point that fall. Even in the winter, didn’t there have to be at least something under there? My mouth actually watered at the thought of half-frozen vegetable stubs. My knowledge of harvest cycles was as spotty as my knowledge of the spirit world.
So I scurried out to the garden plot, prepared to flee back inside if I spotted anyone. This was my first venture into open air since coming back to the museum. The sky was silver mixed with gray, and the wind bit directly into the square inch of chest where my shirt was missing a button. The ground was hard but not, I found when I leaned over, completely frozen. Here was the deer fence around the garden that Butch and I had spent a sunny afternoon building; here were the beams that Hannah and I had dragged off a pickup truck for the raised beds.
With a spade from the shed I started scraping away at the first plot. I had my shirt sleeve pulled down over my hand instead of a glove. Eventually I uncovered some dead and frozen sage leaves, but one nibble revealed that they were too miserable even for me. The second plot had been overtaken entirely by a woody reddish vine that kept snagging on my pants. In the third plot—under a mound still marked with weathered popsicle sticks—I found my first hope of sustenance: a scattering of tiny, filthy potatoes that, collectively, couldn’t have weighed a pound; I held the entire harvest (which I quickly realized included a couple of potato-colored rocks) in my cupped hands.
I won’t go into the trouble it took me to build a fire in the fireplace, or the process by which I convinced myself that it was now dark enough, and that the fire would be small enough, that no passersby would notice the smoke curling out of the chimney. I’ll just say that these potatoes, roasted to the edge of edibility in a historic cast iron pot, were more precious to me than any restaurant meal I’d ever eaten. No wonder our ancestors were so hardy; every calorie was once wrested from the earth like a prisoner of war.
I was going through some old binders in Hannah’s office after dinner—newly fortified, and perhaps lulled into a mild state of slackness, by my potatoes—when I heard, from the front of the house, what sounded very much like gravel crunching and an engine turning off. For a few seconds I sat holding my breath, considering blowing out my candle, wondering whether this could be another hallucination. Hours of anxiously awaiting something do not, it turns out, make the arrival of that thing any less alarming. I shrank back in my chair. And here, before I could think what to do next, were human voices. And now here were footsteps on the porch.
I grabbed my candle and, cupping the flame, raced down the stairs into the basement. When Hannah and I had lived in the museum, I had avoided the basement at all costs; it was my every atavistic terror in the form of a room. The staircase consisted of unmoored two-by-fours. The floor was cold dirt. The walls were stone, meaning made from actual, irregular stones. The ceiling, fiberglass and rusty pipes, was low enough that you had to hunch. And it was now, since even the bulb with the chain didn’t work, as dark as the inside of a coffin.
I went and crouched by the boiler—which was as cold as something dead—and focused on making my breathing quiet. My candle made a ball of light that illuminated nothing but my shaking hands. The whole room seemed to swim with evil. And I could hear, as if I were below the floorboards at a theater, someone knocking at the front door, then muffled voices, then more knocking. And after a minute, with no warning (and this is when my heartbeat became loud enough that I worried it might be audible through the floor), I heard footsteps inside the house.
I’d forgotten the precise terror of being It in hide-and-seek. The voices—there were two male voices, one of them vaguely familiar—sounded much less distinct than the footsteps. I could hear every heel strike and board creak as whoever it was walked from the front hall into the caretaker’s apartment and then back into the living room. Their conversation was strangely sparse—a calm, professional sort of talk. After a couple of minutes I heard the familiar voice say, “Did you get this?” and I listened as one of them shifted something heavy, cursing myself for not having cleaned up my potato dinner.
This went on, this Foley performance of footsteps and pauses and half-audible conversation, for what felt like an hour but really couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes. At some point one or both of them went up to the second floor and the sounds got more distant for a while. My fingers were covered in dribbles of white wax. The seat of my pants was either wet or just very cold. When the footsteps came back down to the first floor I heard the familiar voice make a joke—it sounded like “Corn money?”—and then the other one answer with a short, unamused laugh. The footsteps were directly overhead now, so close that I worried they might hear my candle sputtering. They weren’t saying anything. A walkie-talkie, or something, crackled. And then, just at the moment when I was sure they were going to burst into the basement—I’d decided I would fling myself to the ground and cover my head with my coat—I heard someone opening the front door of the house. There was a crescendo of footsteps, a few indiscernible words, and then the front door closing with a forcible bang. Had that really happened? All I could hear now was my breathing. They were gone, just as if they’d never been there at all. This was another hide-and-seek feeling that I’d forgotten.
I stayed there twitching in the dark for a few minutes, in case they were just circling the house, and by the time I finally decided I was safe, enough time had passed, and I had been in a sufficiently uncomfortable position, that getting to my feet was going to require a series of slow-motion maneuvers. I set my candle on the dirt by the boiler, turned onto my hands and knees, and discovered that my feet were the kind of asleep that makes any movement impossible. So I stayed still for a minute, pounding my throbbing feet against the ground, massaging my calves, and when I looked up, I spotted something in the wavering circle of candlelight. It was tucked between the boiler and the wall a few inches off the ground. My first thought was a user’s manual: Boilers for Dummies, dropped by some long-ago handyman. I extended an arm, in a geriatric yoga pose—the pages, I found as I pried them out from the gap where they’d been crammed, were crushed in at one corner, stained with something damp. It was a notebook with a black-and-white speckled cover.
[Edmund Wright’s journal]
Dec. 8
…
How peculiar that the plainest human life—with its innumerable pleasures & pains; its ceaseless vulnerability; the endless sense of having almost but not quite attained some crucial, unnameable thing; its inevitable end…How very odd that this most common of conditions can, from a certain angle of perception, seem the material for a tale of such surpassing cruelty that not even the most Gothic of authors would…
…
3
I deliberated for a ridiculously long time about where to read Hannah’s notebook: when someone can’t summon the courage to do something, acts of preparation take on special significance. It was pitch-black out by the time I came up from the basement, and for a long time I just paced around the house with my candle and the notebook, like a lunatic in a Poe story. I settled on Hannah’s storage room upstairs, finally. A part of me, I realized, had the feeling that I was about to betray her, and to go into this room—the room that I associated so strongly with everything that had happened to her—felt like an act of pre-absolution. I would baptize myself in her aura.
So I settled in with her notebook in the spot where she used to sit, on the little red cushion on the floor by the window. All around me were binders and boxes and stray bits of curiosity-shop garbage—a folded flag; a copper eagle; a waist-high jumble of empty picture frames. I put my candle on an empty stretch of windowsill. I held a pencil from her desk downstairs, in case I needed to make notes. The room, in the candlelight, was the color of the inside of a tent, with soft-edged shadows. It gets hard, at a certain point,
to tell what sounds are coming from inside your head; I heard buzzing and shaking and a high wavering whine.
In order to see the page I had to hold the notebook up close to the candle with my left hand, so my posture as I read had a strange supplicating quality to it, like a priest with a crucifix. The first pages, sparsely written, seemed to be just ordinary work stuff:
- Call JM re 10/22 event (24 people; chairs?)
- Find out when we did cooking exhibition 2009 & 2010
- Conf call Tues at 4:30, dial-in #4589785 (tell D)
- Get toothpicks, cups, dirt (McKeough’s?)
Hannah, I thought, sweet, sane, conscientious Hannah. Could this really have been you? Have I really been chasing after something this un-mysterious? Maybe Dr. Mital’s good-enough story—that Hannah had succumbed to a mental illness no more otherworldly than a stroke, and that the only complications were in my imagination—really had been true.
But a few pages in, after a blank page and then a few that had been torn out (these, it occurred to me, might be the lists I’d been carrying in my pocket), things started to get weird.
You are sitting on a low wall beside your sister in a park your toes reach the ground you’re wearing a white shirt puffed sleeves short purple shorts your shoes are cheetah-patterned a gnat is struggling to enter your nose your sister says I’ve never seen mom that pissed you make a noise you don’t know whether it means you don’t believe her or you don’t care
