The Open Curtain

by Brian Evenson

  Lael was before him and he felt something in his hands, realized he was still holding the wrinkled and crumpled notes, and when he brought them closer to his face it was as if he had now a sense of the words though he couldn’t exactly read them. And then, at the end of one, a single line, he picked up the letter “W” and next to it an “H,” a “Y,” all capitalized. William Hooper Young, he thought, the man’s initials, but maybe it wasn’t Young, maybe it was simply “why?” W. H. Y.—why? He had never made that connection before. And then, as he looked further, the letters themselves struck him as dubious, a function of the drug, and he was unsure of what he had actually seen.

  Lael was using the tip of the pipe to draw a line in the dirt between them. “Cross the line,” he said, smirking, “and step into Hell.”

  Rudd stared at the line a long moment. He watched as Lael, on his knees, extended it, threaded it in an irregular circle around him.

  “Cross the line,” Lael said, “and enter …”

  Rudd stood. He wavered around the circle, his breath bruising out of him. He began to turn slowly, following the circle around, turning and turning until, nauseous, he pitched into Lael’s arms.

  It was nearly the last moment he would remember of that day. Already as Lael embraced him he felt his vision turn dark and fade. “We’ll go out,” Lael was saying, “All the way out,” and then Lael led him toward the scooter.

  Everything froze in an instant with a click and a flash, and all of it was wiped away, replaced by what looked like a bare, white wall. After a moment he realized he was lying on his back staring at his bedroom ceiling, not on the bed but on the floor.

  He pulled himself up. He felt an ache in both legs. He got to his knees and stood, walking just long enough to fall onto the bed.

  It was dark outside. He tried to sleep but couldn’t, so got up and turned on the desk lamp.

  There, on the door his mother had converted with the help of stacks of bricks into a desk, were his father’s old books. He picked each of them up, turned them about in his hands, dropped them again. He opened his notebook, saw pages filled with the same illegible script as the notes. Other than that, the desk was empty except for a day calendar turned to a date a few months forward. May seventeenth. He turned it back to the current day.

  He got up and went into the bathroom. Filling his cup with water, he drank fully, tasting the traces of toothpaste in the cup. He could see, in the darkness, the ghost of his face in the glass. He turned and flicked on the light and looked at himself in the mirror. Lifting the cup, he drank again, half-watching his reflection, and saw that the cuff of his sweater looked as though it had been dipped in blood.

  The glass clinked against the counter as he put it down, distant, as if in another room. Up close, he stared at the dyed strip of fabric, his gaze falling from there to the back of his hand. He noticed now, in the deepest creases, slight traces of blood.

  He looked at his hands for cuts, felt back along his arms under the fabric of the sweatshirt. There was nothing, no tender or painful spot.

  He stripped off the sweatshirt, running water over the stained cuff, then rubbing the fabric against itself, then rubbing a cracking cake of soap into the stain, then running water over it again. It did not come clean. Balling it up, he hid it under the sink, among the pipes.

  Going into his bedroom, he lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling. After a while, he pulled the telephone over, dialed Lael’s number.

  It was Lael’s mother who answered. At first she claimed to have no son. Then he thought she had hung up. Yet a moment later he was speaking to Lael.

  “What happened?” asked Rudd.

  “Good,” said Lael. “You made it home.”

  “Home from where?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I arrive home,” said Rudd, “and the first thing I notice is blood on my sleeve.”

  “What did you expect?” asked Lael.

  “Is it your blood?”

  “Of course it’s not my blood,” said Lael. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Whose blood is it?”

  “Look,” said Lael, his voice flattening out. “Stop messing with me.”

  “I’m not messing with you,” said Rudd. “I really want to know.”

  For some time, as Rudd stood listening to the underplay of static, Lael didn’t respond.

  “You got me,” said Lael finally, laughing quietly. “You really had me going, brother. See you Saturday.” Rudd heard the line click dead.

  A sort of frenzy, mixed with anxiety, rose in him when he thought about the missing hours. Yet there was nothing there, not even a scattered image. He felt almost as if his head had two brains, each entirely independent of the other, and that he clicked back and forth between them for reasons unknown to him. He was lodged entirely in one brain. He could not say who had taken up residence in the other.

  What was the worst he could have done? he asked himself. He wasn’t covered with blood, had blood only on the extreme of one sleeve. Whose blood was it? Not his, not Lael’s. Not necessarily human. Perhaps they had struck a rabbit or a chipmunk riding the scooter and it had come somehow from that. No matter what had happened, it was not he anyway who had done it: only his body.

  But could he be separated from his body? Wasn’t there some responsibility, no matter what? And wasn’t it his fault that he had said nothing about it, that knowing the hours were blank he continued to act as if he were still unified and whole? Two days later, just below the fold on the front page: Woman Found Dead at base of Squaw Peak. She was young, around seventeen. In addition to the cuts from the fall, she had two lateral incisions, one just over her breast, one across her belly, clearly made (the paper said) not by the fall but by a man-made instrument, probably a small knife. And on her neck, just over her windpipe, were two round bruises where someone had choked her, perhaps enough to render her unconscious before her fall.

  It wasn’t him, he told himself. He was afraid of heights, he couldn’t climb the cliffs, couldn’t get anywhere near that sort of open space and slope without growing dizzy. He wouldn’t even have been able to stand. It was impossible. Even blacked out he couldn’t imagine his body able to negotiate such heights.

  Yet there was always Lael. Perhaps it had been Lael.

  There were tens of thousands of people in Utah valley, he told himself. There was no reason to believe that this had anything to do with him or his half-brother. They were good boys, both of them, he was not concerned, he had nothing to worry about.

  Yet where was the time going? What had happened to him between climbing onto the scooter and arriving home? He would find a hypnotist, would get the memories back that way. No, he could not bring himself to find a hypnotist. In the course of sixty seconds he went from feeling he was terribly ill, that something was desperately wrong, to feeling that everything was all right, that he simply had a faulty memory. Another sixty seconds and he again felt something was desperately wrong. His opinions wouldn’t settle long enough for him to take action. The one time he did pick up the telephone, intending to speak to a psychiatrist, he never managed to get the receiver to his mouth. One moment it was the bright of day and he was holding the telephone receiver in one hand, the next he was crouching behind bushes, in the dark, behind a house he didn’t know. Confused, he pulled himself up, brushed his knees off, walked casually home.

  For a month he looked at each day’s paper carefully, looking for something further about the murder of the young woman. Most days there was nothing. Days when there was news, it was trivial: Police Dub Murderer of Young Woman “Canyon Killer.” Leads were rapidly exhausted, no additional bodies appeared. One expert suggested it was the work of a cult. Another disputed the original findings, suggested the cuts might have come from razor-sharp rocks, that the girl might simply have fallen after all. There was talk of exhuming her body, but nothing was ever done. The police seemed to have no idea who the killer (if there was one) was.

  He tal
ked to Lael about the case and Lael listened to him attentively but had little to say. He would not join in the speculation, though he seemed to enjoy it well enough.

  “Are you fascinated with murder?” Lael asked, in a voice Rudd couldn’t determine to be mocking or not.

  “What?” asked Rudd. “Why should I be?”

  Lael shrugged. “First the Hooper Young case, now this.”

  “You were interested in Hooper Young too,” said Rudd.

  “Sure,” said Lael, his lip half-curling. “But who was it that got me interested?”

  Rudd stared at him a moment, then flicked his gaze in another direction.

  “Do you want me to stop talking about it?” asked Rudd.

  “All I’m asking is, What’s next?”

  “What do you mean, ‘What’s next?’”

  “Just what it sounds like.”

  “It doesn’t sound like anything.”

  Yet later he could not help asking himself the same question. What was next? Where was it leading? Where had it led already? He had known from the beginning that the Hooper Young case was unlikely to yield itself to analysis, no matter how often he went over the newspaper articles and constructed in his mind situations with or without Elling. There would always be uncertainty there. Young’s initials—W. H. Y.—were exemplary; no matter how far he got they would be there, shimmering; Young’s life itself was a continual and unending question. It did not lead him to answers, but to further questions, drawing him into the void, where he was afraid he would catch sight of his own reflection. The canyon killing was the same in substance—unresolved—but where Young’s case was unresolved because of time and distance, the existence/absence of an Elling, this case offered only a corpse and an empty name: “Canyon Killer.” There was nothing behind it, he realized, and he knew the killer would never be caught. It would remain a name that referred to no one, though the suspicion nagged him that if it was associated with anything, it was with his own body. What’s next? Rudd wondered. He finally asked Lael, “What’s going to happen?”

  “Anything can happen,” said Lael. “Absolutely anything.”

  9

  Sometimes at night, drifting toward sleep, he would see, in the wrinkle of the curtains or the oak grain of his armoire, glimpses of Hooper Young. He did not know how he knew it was Young—he had never seen a picture of the man—but he was certain it was him. He had a dark complexion, a certain charisma. Rudd would flick his eyes away and when they flicked back, the face would have vanished. Sometimes, in the afterimage Hooper Young left, he thought he glimpsed something else, a different face. But this face did not give up its identity easily.

  It made him reluctant to sleep. He would stay awake for hours, stumbling about or reading until he was falling asleep between lines, the plot of the book taking a hallucinatory turn as he slipped in and out. He didn’t feel well, though it wasn’t anything tangible or physical, nothing he could put a finger on.

  He began doing well in school again, schoolwork distracting him at least for a time, keeping him from wondering if he were going mad. His neck ached; he tried not to read it as an indication of something seriously wrong—he had given up defining himself as ill. He tried too to continue ignoring the vanished hours, as well as the rips and tears that appeared in the same bloody-cuffed sweatshirt that he often found himself wearing, late at night, though he had no memory of putting it on.

  His mother was there, knocking at his door, asking him if something was wrong. He tried to use his voice, but he couldn’t—his mouth kept opening and shutting, only a hiss of air coming out. The handle rattled and his mother knocked again, demanding he unlock the door.

  He stumbled from bed, made his way in darkness to the door, then stood there, trying to speak, only managing the low hissing, his chest and throat heaving.

  “Rudd?” his mother said, her voice higher than normal.

  He reached out and unlocked the door, pulled it open slightly, just enough for her to see his face. She was standing in her robe, one hand held out as if to knock again.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  He nodded slowly.

  “I mean,” she said, and half-glanced down the hall. “I heard shouting.”

  He shook his head.

  “It wasn’t your voice,” she said. “It was another voice. Then, just a moment ago, a hiss.”

  He shrugged, slowly closing the door. She blocked the gap with her forearm.

  “You’re alone in there?” she asked.

  He nodded again, trying gently to push her arm out.

  “Nothing’s wrong?” She was staring at his face, trying to smile. “Why aren’t you saying anything?”

  He opened his mouth wide, felt his tongue pulse, struggle to speak, but hissing instead. His mother’s eyes rolled back and she collapsed.

  By the time he had straightened her on the floor and rubbed her face, thinking that it might help somehow, he had his voice back. It was awkward at first, somewhat harsh, but it quickly got better and stronger. Her eyes fluttered open and she looked at him warily, without speaking or moving.

  “You’re all right?” he asked.

  “You can speak?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “You couldn’t a moment ago.”

  “Of course I did,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  She stared up at him. He held his face lax hoping she would not know he was lying. Then he pulled her up.

  “It’s late,” he said. “Go back to bed.”

  As he slept less and read the scriptures more, it began to seem as if they were speaking directly to him, encouraging him to do something he could never quite put his finger on, offering a kind of destiny. Everything he read, even his schoolwork, even a story problem in geometry, seemed to have a secret meaning cached just below the surface, but it was a meaning he was never quite able to uncover. He would see Young now not just at night and in dreams, finely controlled in the textures of a curtain or a blotch of paint, but everywhere, out of the corner of his eyes, gone when he tried to see him more clearly. The dark and undefinable Elling, if he was Elling, was there too. He could burrow into school or other pursuits and be briefly free of it, but he knew always in the back of his head that he would see them again. It was most frequent, he began to realize, as he neared a blackout.

  The whole of his life began to resemble a hallucination, dark and folded inward as if assembled from his mind. There was a falsity to it, as if he were acting, and often he found himself having to hold himself back from laughter because everything seemed contrived. All that really mattered were the blotted hours, but they were the only things he had no access to. He borrowed a video camera, tried turning it on when he sensed a blackout coming, but when he came conscious again the cassette was removed, the tape spooled out into a loopy, shiny pile. On the wall was written a note in pencil, but again it was nothing he could make out. Perhaps it wasn’t letters at all but some other system of symbols. From a certain angle, if he looked at the marks for only an instant, they resembled the sacred marks on his mother’s temple garments, and once the idea was in his head he started to see the marks everywhere, on every surface, God’s claim to all. He could do without sleep, he knew; all he had to do was close his eyes and he could rest, but he would go on thinking the whole time his eyes were closed, his eyes still closed but seeing the marks on the wall in his memory. Then, just as suddenly, the feeling left him and he was holding his pencil, trying to erase God’s marks from everything, then knowing he had to get out. He was out in the hall and past his mother without speaking to her and down the hall and out the door. The whole world was running all awash with noise, too much noise for him to sort anything out. A voice was speaking, but it was not his voice, and how it had come to be in his head he didn’t know. It was not to be believed. He was fine, healthy, the world had always been speaking to him, only he had never been able to hear it until now. Soon he would not only hear it but comprehend it, and then he
would know what was expected of him, what he should do next.

  “Rudd?” a voice was saying, “Rudd?” It took him a moment to realize the voice was not inside him but somewhere before him. A dark face, Elling. Only not Elling. A woman. Mrs. Madison.

  “Is anything wrong, Rudd?” she asked.

  He knew the right answer. He started to raise his hand, then realized it was not the sort of answer you raised your hand to give. “No,” he said. “I’m fine.” It was the truth, in a sense, and if it wasn’t true exactly it was certainly necessary. One lived by necessary things and necessity—

  “You’re certain?”

  Had the first answer been wrong? Was it the wrong voice he was listening to, or if not the wrong voice maybe he was mishearing the right one? He looked up and into her face again, saw her features shadowing, her voice growing dim.

  “To tell the truth, I haven’t been sleeping well lately,” he mumbled, his vision dimming, blackout, blackout, blackout.

  And then, just as Rudd had shown up at Lael’s door for the first time, unannounced, in midafternoon, several years before, there was Lael, this time at Rudd’s door.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “What?” asked Lael. “You asked me to come.”

  “I asked you?”

  “Today’s the day, May seventeenth, remember?”

  He did not know what to say. “How did you get here?” he asked.

  Lael looked at him, lips closed, head tilted slightly. “You loaned me your scooter.”

  “Oh,” said Rudd. “Yes.”

  “Is anything wrong?”

  “No,” said Rudd, already seeing the patches starting to spread across Lael’s face, the dark mask overlapping it. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

  And then it was as if he blinked his eyes to find himself riding not on the back of the scooter this time but on the front, Lael hanging on to him from behind. He swerved a little, slowed down, realized he didn’t even know where he was going. He kept going straight. It was the middle of the day, perhaps the same day, perhaps another day, and they were driving through fields on back roads, farms all around them, the mountains looming before them, rocky and scrub-covered and awkward. The scooter was whining and his hands tingled from the vibration as if coming asunder, and he realized he was holding the grips too tightly. He could see in the back of each of his hands the shadow of Elling’s face, and had difficulty paying attention to the road. He kept looking at the faces on his hands and then glancing at the mirror, trying to catch Lael’s reflection to compare, though he could see nothing of Lael, felt only his chin pressing into Lael’s back—or rather Lael’s chin pressed into his back, Lael’s head hidden behind his own body. Yet it was as if it were Lael’s back and his chin because before it had always been that way; he felt for a moment that he had exchanged bodies with Lael. As he let the idea fill his head it was almost as if he couldn’t see to drive because his face was pressed to his own back. He was trying to raise his head, but when he finally did, he was not on the scooter at all and Lael was not in front of him but beside him and they were both of them marching not along a road but up the slope of a hill. He felt himself growing dizzy, so to distract himself he tried to keep his eyes on Lael instead of the slope. He went stumbling upward, listening to a ragged wind that he came to realize was his own mutilated breathing. Or his own mixed with Lael’s who, he now perceived, had in his hand a glinting object that he made out to be a knife.