The Man on the Ceiling

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  A woman who had read my stories once asked me, “But doesn’t it make you sad, so terribly, terribly sad?” I remember mouthing platitudes about how the dark makes us appreciate the light more, how it increases the magnitude of the joy when there is joy, and this was all true, as far as I am able to discern the truth.

  What I tried not to say to her was, “Of course it’s sad. Some things are terribly, terribly sad.”

  And perhaps the strangest thing is that I’ve still been able to find the beauty in it, no matter how awful, how intolerable it becomes. Down here in the dark.

  Down here in the dark, I close my eyes and the boy without a name pads across the carpet and whispers into my ear. I don’t know if this is my son or someone else’s son. When Anthony died I felt willing to do anything if I could just spend a few more minutes with him. For weeks my fictional output consisted of possible bargains I might make with God or the Fates or the Biological Prime Movers or whoever or whatever controlled such life and death matters for us unfortunate mortals. Maybe I could trade my sanity for one hour more of my son’s time. Maybe there was something I could destroy as a kind of sacrifice. Maybe I could burn down this house, this place I have loved so long, take it down into ashes, take it down to ground, take it down into the dark with me. Or maybe if I gave up speech, or no, what if I gave up writing? If I swore I’d never compose another word for whatever remained of my life, then would they give me back my son?

  But I didn’t believe in gods or fates or movers prime or otherwise. I had a head full of elaborate, even beautiful prayers and no one to submit them to.

  So over the years there was nowhere for my son to go but into my stories, and into the smaller, hidden rooms of my imagination. Not always obvious or particularly identifiable, but a character presence just the same.

  Down here this little boy tells me to leave him alone to please just let him be.

  But down here in the dark, I am king. No one can tell me what to do. Down here in the dark, I sit on my throne of failing flesh and I wear a crown and jewels of swarming, dancing flies. Sometimes their buzzing is so loud I can hardly hear the weeping that fills these rooms late at night after everyone else has gone to bed.

  But I do hear. And I realize this is as far as I can go, this is as far as anyone should ever ask me to go. So I take this child and I tuck him into the wall, the flaps of plaster gone rubbery as they wind him in like a sheet.

  After five kids I’m tired and I’m done, at least that’s the way I’d been thinking. I can’t say we’re not tempted, both of us—for me a few years ago it was the little dark girl with the deformed face who would require multiple surgeries to effect a transformation that still wouldn’t make her look like everybody else. For Melanie it was a more recent encounter with an honest-to-God feral child. That temptation comes in large part because these are kids we know we could take care of, but I have to admit it’s also because they have an air of the mythic about them, of having just stepped out of some dark fairytale, and dark fairytales are something Melanie and I can appreciate.

  But I’m tired, I’m heading into my late fifties and I know that time has passed for me. So what am I doing with this little boy? What am I thinking about here? And how am I going to explain him to our other children?

  Not because it’s smart. Not because I’m being a good father. Not even because I have the faintest clue what I’m doing. But because it’s my responsibility. Because it’s what I’m supposed to do. Because it’s what I do.

  But when I try to look into this child’s face one last time I see that he is gone. I look around at these walls: flesh or stone or something in between, and I can hear his child’s laughter just on the other side. Only stone separates us. Only stone and dirt and the years of used-up memories separate us. Only his skin separates us. And I close my eyes and hold my breath and push on through.

  Once inside this other geometry, this alternate architecture of our house, I’m surprised I’m not better prepared for it. After all, haven’t I imagined and re-imagined this place between places hundreds of times? Haven’t I walked here in my dreams? And who better to see it than someone who has worked on this old structure for more than two decades, peeked under the floorboards, excavated its lath and plaster walls, studied its wiring and plumbing, peeled back its skins of paint and wallpaper to find the face it wore for its first owners? But I didn’t see this coming.

  My boy without a name is still in sight, still clinging to what passes for a ceiling here (roots and sheets of moss, hair of a thousand heads, an infectious whispering from the dark jewelry of insect life that toils and boils and clings there, and discarded toys once too precious to name, now irretrievable from the greedy grip of time) and I hold my breath waiting for him to fall, waiting in fact for it all to come down, for there is absolutely nothing holding all this up, there is nothing holding him, or any of the rest of us for that matter, as high as our dreams or nightmares seek to take us.

  Yet he manages to defy gravity as we all do, so I take a first cautious step in my attempt to follow him, my shoe sinking into the rotting tissue of the eight hundred thirty-two sheets that have sheathed the beds of this house over a hundred years, grabbing onto railings wired together from antique broom handles, hobby horses, and greasy candlesticks, my fingers scraping through a thick cushion of dust that itself murmurs and sings, and time here is a cold draft that steals my breath, and I stumble forward desperate to catch it again.

  I call up to my lovely boy, “Wait! Please!” and he turns and grins playfully, as if this at last is the best game he’d always been denied. I can’t help but smile back at him because nothing’s better than when a lonely child manages to play.

  And this is the way it is for us as we pass up one level and down three more, sideways for a time and then it’s me crawling across the ceiling, my head hanging down like a broken knob, and he’s the one chasing below and trying name after Rumpelstiltskin name none of which I recognize because no one ever cared enough to give me one that fit well enough not to fall off. So I crawl ahead naked of name but I know it could be worse.

  Then it’s me chasing again, not sure if it’s a real chase or just hide-and-seek, speed encumbered by the desire never to let the playtime end. I push my way past lamps that don’t work and the myriad traps that do, tiny rooms encapsulating that one great moment—whatever it was, whenever it happened—that if you’re not careful will harden into a defining moment and you’ll let yourself stay there the rest of your life.

  The strangest thing, I must admit, is that it’s not so strange at all. Who among us can manage a life in the present for more than fifteen minutes at a time? So often living in the present is like sticking your head under water: the scenery is new and the light is different but sooner or later you have to jerk your head back into the atmosphere you know and think you understand.

  Down here in the dark is the life every house knows from birth until final destruction. Down here in the dark is every chair, every plate, every spoon this home has housed, every coat hung up in haste, every shirt cast off in passion, every spoiled handkerchief and every injured shoe. Down here are the hats without reason, the mirrors unseeing, the sad doll in the windowsill, the letters unmailed and more unanswered. Here are the prizes we’d hoped for and the tears whose tracks gather dust.

  I’m tired past sleep but so worried this child will hurt himself, even though I know they all do, and will, however much you shout into their faces and wring the juice from your own hands. I push myself forward through the ever-rising tide of my life’s debris and reach for him, reach for him begging him to come down. But he’s having so much fun, maybe for the first time ever—he thinks every obstacle is a game now and every word I push his way just another aspect of the joke.

  The walls here are board and paste and horsehair, then ages of plastered yellow newspaper to cover the chinks, then I’m rushing past graffiti, exclamations of bored despair and love notes to the world, then stretch after stretch of wallpaper, so
me I recognize as coverings I had stripped away, and in one long hall from the twenties, yellow fish in a vast green sea, the fish shapes drift in and out of the wall surface keeping pace with me, now and again vanishing completely, only to pop their heads right out of the wall on my next step, their mouths open with the astonishment of my presence.

  The walls grow color and melt. The walls spin tumble dry low. In this more complicated home I am the intruder, my claims of ownership a child’s whine after dinner when dessert is denied.

  Out of the moments ago behind me two women with beautiful heads of cascading nerve come floating. One stretches a pale, stick-like limb across my shoulders as if to comfort me. The other lays finger to lips. This is the time, she offers softly, as the other peels my suddenly sleeping boy off the ceiling and settles him at my feet. This is the time.

  Of course it is. It gathers itself around us, it sneaks past us like a criminal on the run. It’s always one step ahead but six steps behind.

  Sometimes we get so close. Sometimes we almost know. But things don’t stop, things don’t stop, not even when breath weakens and falls behind.

  Down here in the dark, things don’t stop.

  Chapter 11

  Everything We’re Telling You Here Is True

  This is the closest I can get.

  Melanie and I tell our stories expecting some meaning in the end. We tell ourselves this is all going somewhere. Sometimes we get so close, reach so far, we can smell it from over the mountain, we can see flashes of it in the distant sunlight, we can almost make out the faces in the photographs, and where the lines split apart, and what they reveal.

  Often we do not choose our stories, but our stories choose us.

  Once upon a time, I can’t quite find Steve. He’s here and he’s somewhere else.

  This story is as true as I know it to be. It’s my story, not his.

  I’m afraid of secrets. But also, secrets fascinate and reassure me. Steve is full of secrets, though he’s the most open and accessible man I’ve ever known. He welcomes me closer and closer, and knowing that there will always be a space between his story line and mine is part of the richness of the life we keep discovering together. Even when it scares me to death.

  I imagine a story similar to what I guess he might be thinking about, and then I see if he’s there. If I find him, if I manage to come as close to finding him as anyone ever finds anyone, I might tell him to come home for dinner. Or I might see if I can go with him, into a story that includes us both. Or, if I’m strong enough, I might let him go.

  Once upon a time, I might let him go.

  When I look back at the words I have written to Melanie and myself, the stories that have tumbled out of that collision of the real and the dream and the dream that is real, I realize I didn’t mean to tell so much and I didn’t mean to tell so little. But this is my testament. This is our imaginations’ biography, and our job is to feed it what it needs, and sometimes what it needs is for us to let go, to surrender our need for you to think of us as wise or happy or sane. Sometimes what it needs is our very lives.

  Once upon a time. Once upon a time we get so close, we get so close. That’s the mystery of it, the romance and the fantasy, the horror.

  Ask the man on the ceiling. But don’t count on him telling you what you wanted to hear. Don’t count on him answering you at all.

  Sometimes not getting there is half the fun. I believe Melanie has known this for some time. I used to think you had to arrive, otherwise you weren’t going anywhere. More and more we understand how the music comes from the pulse of blood through the body, the movement of muscle across bone, the coming and going of events, the people who pass in and out of immediate personal space. The line of it goes up and up and up, closer and closer to whatever other line there is, that first heart-rending tone of “Rhapsody in Blue,” the single acoustic guitar and the huge concert organ playing note for note and coming close to each other but never quite blending, the cello like the movement of the storyteller under the earth.

  The demons and the angels cooped up in the house have to be taken out for a walk now and then, so they can run around on the grass, smell the other creatures who’ve been there, relieve themselves. It’s not always much fun, but it is something I can do, which makes it my responsibility to do it.

  Later, when Melanie finally gets into the car, she apologizes for keeping me waiting. There was something she had to take care of in the attic or in the basement, some story she’s been waiting for that finally came to her and she had to write it down, some dream that wouldn’t let her wake up, some last-minute good-byes she had to say.

  Our trips are shorter these days. I can’t drive as long or as far as I used to, and driving at night is harder because the lights tend to bother me and there are lines crisscrossing everywhere. That’s okay; I never really enjoyed driving anyway. Melanie has ideas for our future travels, such as the Grand Canyon. I say to her, “Are you crazy? All those cliffs and drop-offs?” And you can bet I’m not getting on a burro.

  I like nothing better than staying at home. But I know that getting out now and again is good for me. We settle back in our seats, fasten our seatbelts, smile at each other. I start the car.

  We pass the line of children slowly, knowing how children can be careless. They wrestle and shove each other. They don’t pay attention. They run into things. They put ropes around their necks that become nooses. They fall.

  I check out the back seat. It’s amazing the amount of equipment people take along. Special pillows. Extra blankets. Extra socks. Cameras and flash attachments and film, as if a moment could be captured. And kids. It seems there have always been, and always will be, the kids. I’m not sure who we have with us this day. When they sleep, as they so often do on these road trips, they look like they were when they were little. They resemble themselves, and they resemble their own children, down to the exact angle at which a mouth hangs open, the exact same placement of a hand. And despite the fact that they have come to us in such different ways, from such different worlds, I always find it remarkable how much they resemble each other. And us.

  There’s still a little room left in the car. There’s always a little room left.

  Ahead of us on the side of the road is a small boy with light brown hair and glasses. For a time after Anthony died I noticed little boys who looked like him everywhere, and I tried to take that as evidence that there’d been a mistake at the hospital, some sort of trick, a variant on the apocryphal story of babies being switched at birth—it was somebody else’s son who’d died, not ours, and I was sorry for those parents, but Anthony, Anthony, Anthony was alive. Story after story I made up, but none of them was in any sense true.

  I slow down the car, then stop. I can no longer look at the boy, but Melanie gasps and I see the expression on her face. The back door opens, I hear him slide onto the seat, the door slams.

  Not knowing what else to do, I put the car into drive again, moving away from this line of children with their pale faces and pitiful belongings. In the rearview mirror I see there are more than ever, and I see that the car behind us is going to stop.

  Anthony is singing to himself, a favorite sound, that music children make for themselves when they’re pleased about something. Scared, I look at him in the rearview mirror as long as I can stand it. His little glasses are crooked. He always had a hard time keeping them on straight. Weeping silently, I’m afraid I won’t be able to drive.

  “It’s okay,” Melanie says softly beside me, patting my leg.

  “Do we tell him? Do we need to tell him?” I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand.

  “I don’t know,” she says. She’s crying, too. “I don’t know.” And that’s all we say about it as we head on down the road. All I can be sure of is that he has no other life than this, no other life beyond what Melanie and I can imagine.

  After a while I find I can look into the mirror again: Anthony asleep by the window, his fine blondish hair blowing across his glas
ses. Beside him Gabriella has stretched out her long legs, her mouth pursed in sleep as if dreaming solutions to some complicated math. Joe has his arms crossed, his eyes tightly shut, holding it all in. Chris sleeps the sleep of the innocent, his face soft and at last untroubled. Veronica lies curled at one end of the seat, her legs drawn up in a fetal position, and again I am amazed at how much she contains, yet how small the space she can occupy.

  I reach up and adjust the mirror, moving it about dangerously, one eye on the road ahead as I look for them, for I know they must be there. And yes, piled up like puppies, Sophia, Mya, Katy, and Christiana, our granddaughters.

  Later we will speak. We will tell them stories. We will tell them this story. Everything we tell them will be true.

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3