Interior Darkness: Selected Stories

by Peter Straub

  He would take her out once, in some indeterminate future time. The differences between them would speak for themselves, and he and Marty would part with a mixture of regret and relief. It was this infinitely postponable scenario that hovered about him with such delightful vagueness.

  Bunting turned up Eighth Avenue smiling to himself. When he saw that he was walking past a drugstore he turned in and moved through the aisles until he came to a large display of baby bottles. Here beside the three kinds of Evenflo and Playtex hung bottles he had never heard of—no sturdy Prentisses, but squat little blue bottles and bottles with patterns and flags and teddy bears, a whole range of baby bottles made by a company named Ama. Bunting saw instantly that Ama was a wonderful company. They were located in Florida, and they had a sunny, inventive, Floridian sensibility. Bunting began scooping up bottles, and ended up carrying an awkward armful to the counter.

  “How many babies you got?” the young woman behind the register asked him.

  “These are for a project,” Bunting said.

  “Like a collection?” she asked. Her head tilted prettily in the dusty light through the big plate-glass window on Eighth Avenue.

  “Yes, like a collection,” Bunting said. “Exactly.” He smiled at her bushy hair and puzzling eyes.

  Outside the drugstore, he moved to the curb and raised his hand for a cab. With the same heightened sense of self that came when he bought his splendid suits, he rode back to his building in the ripped backseat of a jouncing, smelly taxi, splurging another fifteen cents every time the meter changed.

  4

  That night he ate a microwaved Lean Cuisine dinner and divided his attention between the evening news on his television set and the array of freshly washed bottles on both sides of it. The news seemed outmoded and repetitious, the bottles various and pristine. The news had happened before, the same murders and explosions and declarations and demonstrations had occurred yesterday and the day before and the week and month before that, but the bottles existed in present time, unprecedented and extraordinary. The news was routine, the bottles possessed wonder. It was difficult for him to take his eyes from them.

  How many bottles, he wondered, would it take to fill up his table? Or his bed?

  For an instant, he saw his entire room festooned, engorged with cylindrical glass and plastic bottles—blue bottles covering one wall, yellow ones another, a curving path between bottles on the floor, a smooth cushion of nippled bottles on his bed. Bunting blinked and smiled as he chewed on turkey. He sipped Spanish burgundy from one of the new glass Evenflos.

  When he dumped the Lean Cuisine tray in the garbage and dropped his silverware in the sink, Bunting scrubbed out the bottle, rinsed the nipple, and set them on his draining board. He put a kettle of hot water on the stove, two teaspoons of instant coffee in one of the new bottles, and added boiling water and cold milk before screwing on the nipple. He poured a generous slug of cognac into another new bottle, a squat, pink, friendly-looking little Ama, and took both bottles to his bed along with a pen and a pad of paper.

  Bunting pulled coffee, then cognac, into his mouth, and let the little pink Ama dangle from his mouth while he wrote.

  Dear Mom and Dad,

  There have been some changes that I ought to tell you about. For some time there have been difficulties between Veronica and me which I haven’t told you about because I didn’t want you to worry about me. I guess what it boils down to is that I’ve been feeling you could say stultified by our relationship. This has been difficult for both of us, after all the time we’ve been together, but things are finally resolved, and Veronica and I are only distant friends now. Of course there has been some pain, but I felt that my freedom was worth that price.

  Lately I have been seeing a girl named Carol, who is really great. I met her in an art gallery where she works, and we hit it off right away. Carol makes me feel loved and cared for, and I love her already, but I’m not going to make the mistake of tying myself down so soon after breaking up with Veronica, and I’m going out with two other great girls too. I’ll tell you about them in the weeks to come.

  Unfortunately, I will still not be able to come for Christmas, since New York is getting so expensive, and my rent just went up to an astronomical sum…

  If nobody hears the tree falling down in the forest, does it make any sound?

  Does the air hear?

  When his letter was done, Bunting folded it into an envelope and set it aside to be mailed in the morning. It was two hours to bedtime. He removed his jacket, loosened his tie, and slipped off his shoes. He thought of Veronica, sitting on the edge of a bed on the east side of town. A Merlin phone on a long cord sat beside her. Veronica’s eyes were dark and hard, and a deep vertical line between her harsh thick eyebrows cut into her forehead. Bunting noticed for the first time that her calves were skinny, that the loose skin beneath her eyes was a shade darker than the rest of her face. Without his noticing it, Veronica had been getting old. She had been hardening and drying like something left out in the sun. It came to him that he had always been unsuitable for her, and that was why she had chosen him. In her personal life, she set up situations destined from the first to fail. He had spent years “with” Veronica, but he had never understood this before.

  He had been an actor in a psychic drama, and he had done no more than to play his role.

  It came to him that Veronica had deliberately introduced him to a way of life he could not afford by himself in order to deprive him of it later. If he had not broken off with her, she would have dropped him. Veronica was a poignant case. Those winks and flashes of leg in office meetings had simply been part of a larger plan unconsciously designed to leave him gasping in pain. Without Bunting, she would find someone else—an impoverished young poet, say—and do the whole thing over again, dinner at the Blue Goose and first-class trips to Switzerland (Bunting had not told his parents about traveling first class), orchestra seats at Broadway plays, until what was twisted in her made her discard him.

  Bunting felt sort of…awed. He knew someone like that.

  He washed the Evenflo, refilled the pink little bottle with cognac, and picked up his novel and went back to bed to read. For a moment he squirmed around on top of his sheets, getting into the right position. He sucked cognac into his mouth, swallowed, and opened the book.

  The lines of print swam up to meet him, and instantly he was on top of a quick little gray horse named Shorty, looking down the brown sweep of a hill toward a herd of grazing buffalo. An enormous, nearly cloudless sky hung above him; far ahead, so distant they were colorless and vague, a bumpy line of mountains rose up from the yellow plain. Shorty began to pick his way down the hill, and Bunting saw that he was wearing stained leather chaps over his trousers, a dark blue shirt, a sheepskin vest, and muddy brown boots with tarnished spurs. Two baby bottles had been inserted, nipple-down, into holsters on his hips, and a rifle hung in a long sheath from the pommel of his saddle. Shorty’s muscles moved beneath his legs, and a strong smell of horse came momentarily to Bunting, then was gone in a wave of fresh, living odors from the whole scene before him. A powerful smell of grass dominated, stronger than the faint, tangy smell of the buffalo. From a long way off, Bunting smelled fresh water. Off to the east, someone was burning dried sod in a fireplace. The strength and clarity of these odors nearly knocked Bunting off his horse, and Shorty stopped moving and looked around at him with a large, liquid brown eye. Bunting smiled and prodded Shorty with his heels, and the horse continued walking quietly down the hill, and the astonishing freshness of the air sifted around and through him. It was the normal air of this world, the air he knew.

  Shorty reached the bottom of the hill and began moving slowly alongside the great herd of buffalo. He wanted to move into a gallop, to cut toward the buffalo and divide them, but Bunting pulled back on the reins. Shorty’s hide quivered, and the short coarse hairs scratched against Bunting’s chaps. It was important to proceed slowly and get into firing range before s
cattering the buffalo. A few of the massive bearded heads swung toward Bunting and Shorty as they plodded west toward the front of the herd. One of the females snorted and pushed her way toward the center of the herd, and the others grunted and moved aside to let her pass. Bunting slipped his rifle from its case, checked to be sure it was fully loaded, and held it across his lap. He stuffed six extra shells in each pocket of the sheepskin vest.

  Shorty was ambling away past the front of the herd now, something like fifty yards away from the nearest animals. A few more of the buffalo watched him. Their furry mouths drizzled onto the grass. When he passed out of their immediate field of vision, they did not turn their heads but went back to nuzzling the thick grass. Bunting kept moving until he was far past the front of the herd, and then cut Shorty back around in a wide circle behind them.

  The herd moved very slightly apart; now the males had noticed him, and were watching to see what he would do. Bunting knew that if he got off the horse and stood in the sun for a few minutes the males would walk up to him and stand beside him and find on him the smell of every place he had ever been in his life. Then the ones who liked the smells would stay around him and the rest would wander off a little way. That was what buffalo did, and it was fine if you could stand their own smell.

  Bunting cocked his rifle, and one big male raised his head and shook it, as if trying to get rid of a bad dream.

  Bunting kept Shorty moving on a diagonal line toward the middle of the herd, and the buffalo began moving apart very slowly.

  The big male who had been watching seemed to come all the way out of his dream, and started ambling toward him. Bunting was something like ten yards from the big male, and twenty yards from the rest of the herd. It wasn’t too bad: it could have been better but it would do.

  Bunting raised his rifle and aimed it at the center of the big male’s forehead. The buffalo instantly stopped moving and uttered a deep sound of alarm that made the entire herd ripple. A single electrical impulse seemed to pass through all the animals ranged out before Bunting. Bunting squeezed the trigger, and the rifle made a flat cracking sound that instantly spread to all parts of the long grassy plain, and the big male went down on his front knees and then collapsed onto his side.

  The rest of the herd exploded. Buffalo ran toward the hill and scattered across the plain. Bunting kicked Shorty into action and rode into their midst, shooting as he went. Two others fell instantly, then a third around whose body Shorty wheeled. Two of the fastest buffalo had reached the hill, and Bunting aimed and fired and brought them down. He reloaded as a line of panicked buffalo swung away from the hill and bolted deeper into the meadow. The leader fell and rolled, and Shorty carried Bunting up alongside the second in line. Bunting shot the second buffalo in the eye, and it shuddered and fell. He swiveled in the saddle and brought down two more that were pounding toward the opposite end of the meadow.

  By now the grass was spattered with blood, and the air had become thick with the screams of dying animals and the buzzing of flies. Bunting’s own hands were spotted with blood, and long smears of blood covered his chaps. He fired until the rifle was empty, and then he reloaded and fired again as Shorty charged and separated the stampeding buffalo, and in the end he thought that only a few of the fastest animals had escaped. Dead and dying buffalo like huge sacks of dark brown wool lay all over the meadow, males and females. A few infant buffalo who had been trampled in the panic lay here and there in the tall grass.

  Bunting swung himself off Shorty and went moving among the prone buffalo, slitting open the bellies of the dead. A great rush of purple and silver entrails fell out of the dead buffalo’s body cavities, and Bunting’s arms grew caked with drying blood. At last he came to a young female that was struggling to get onto its feet. He took one of the baby bottles from his holster, put the barrel behind the animal’s ear, and pulled the trigger. The female jerked forward and slammed its dripping muzzle into the grass. Bunting sliced open its belly.

  He skinned the female, then moved to another. He managed to skin four of the buffalo, a third of all he had killed, before it grew too dark to work. His arms and shoulders ached from tearing the thick flesh away from the animals’ fatty hides. The entire meadow reeked of blood and death. Bunting built a small fire and unrolled his pack beside it and lay down to doze until morning.

  Then the meadow and the night and the piles of dead animals slid away into nothingness, into white space, and Bunting’s head jerked up. He was lying in his bed, and there was no fire, and for a moment he did not understand why he could not see the sky. A close, stuffy odor, the odor of himself and his room, surrounded him. Bunting looked back at the book and saw that he had reached the end of a chapter. He shook his head, rubbed his face, and took in that he was wearing a shirt, a tie, the trousers to a good suit.

  More than three hours had passed since he had picked up The Buffalo Hunter. He had been reading, and what he had read was a single chapter of a novel by Luke Short. The chapter seemed incomparably more real than his own life. Now Bunting regarded the book as though it were a bomb, a secret weapon—it had stolen him out of the world. While he had been in the book, he had been more purely alive than at any other time during the day.

  Bunting could not keep himself from testing the book again. His mouth was dry, and his heart was thumping hard enough nearly to shake the bed. He picked up the book and sucked cognac, for courage, from the little pink bottle. The book opened in his hand to the words CHAPTER THREE. He looked down to the first line of print, saw the words “The sun awakened him…” and in an instant he was lying on a bed of thick grass beside a low, smoky fire. His horse whickered softly. The sun, already warm, slanted into his eyes and dazzled him, and he threw off his blanket and got to his feet. His hips ached. A thick mat of flies covered the heaps of entrails, dark blood glistened on the grass, and Bunting closed his eyes and wrenched himself out of the page and back into his own body. He was breathing hard. The world of the book still seemed to be present, just out of sight, calling him.

  Hurriedly he put the book on the seat of his chair and stood up. The room swayed twice, right to left, left to right, and Bunting put out his hand to steady himself. He had been lost inside the book for only a few hours, but now it felt like he had spent an entire night asleep in a bloody meadow, keeping uneasy watch over a slaughtered herd. He turned the book over so that its cover was facedown on his chair, and carried the bottle to the counter. He refilled it with cognac and took two large swallows before screwing the nipple back on.

  What had happened to him was both deeply disturbing and powerfully, seductively pleasurable. It was as if he had traveled backward in time, gone into a different body and a different life, and there lived at a pitch of responsiveness and openness not available to him in his real, daily life. Bunting began to tremble again, remembering the clarity and freshness of the air, the touch of Shorty’s coarse hair against his legs, the way the big male buffalo had come slowly toward him as the others began to stir apart—in that world, everything had possessed consequence. No detail was wasted because every detail overflowed with meaning.

  He sucked cognac into his mouth, troubled by something else that had just occurred to him.

  Bunting had read The Buffalo Hunter three or four times before—he had a small shelf of Western and mystery novels, and he read them over and over. What troubled him was that there was no slaughter of buffalo in The Buffalo Hunter. Bunting could remember—vaguely, without any particularity—a few scenes in which the hunter rode down buffalo and killed them, but none in which he massacred great numbers and waded through their bloody entrails.

  Bunting let the bottle hang down from the nipple in his teeth and looked around his cramped, disorderly little room. For a moment—less than that, for an almost imperceptible fraction of a second—his familiar squalor seemed almost to tremble with promise, like the lips of one on the verge of telling a story. Bunting had the sense of some unimaginable anticipation, and then it was gone, so quickly
it barely had time to leave behind the trace of an astonished curiosity.

  He wondered if he dared go back to The Buffalo Hunter, and then knew he could not resist it. He would give himself a few more hours’ reading, then pull himself out of the book and make sure he got enough sleep.

  Bunting took off the rest of his clothes and hung up the excellent suit. He brushed his teeth and ran hot water over the dishes in the sink to discourage the roaches. Then he turned off the overhead light and the other lamp and got into bed. His heart was beating fast again: he trembled with an almost sexual anticipation: and he licked his lips and took the book off the crowded seat of the chair. He nestled into the sheets and folded his pillow. Then at last Bunting opened the book once again.

  5

  When the white spaces came he held himself in suspension as he turned the page and in this way went without a break from waking in the morning and skinning the buffalo and rigging a sledge to drag them behind Shorty to selling them to a hide broker and being ambushed and nearly killed for the money. Bunting was thrown in jail and escaped, found Shorty tethered in a feedlot, and spent two nights sleeping in the open. He got a job as a ranch hand and overheard enough to learn that the hide broker ran the town: after that, Bunting shot a man in a gunfight, escaped arrest again, stole his hides back from a locked warehouse, killed two more men in a gunfight, faced down the crooked broker, and was offered and refused the position of town sheriff. He rode out of the town back toward the freedom he needed, and two days later he was looking again across a wide plain of grazing buffalo. Shorty began trotting toward them, moving at an angle that would take him past the top of the herd. Bunting patted the extra shells in the pockets of his sheepskin vest and slowly drew the rifle from its sheath. A muscle twitched in Shorty’s flank. A shaggy female buffalo cocked her head and regarded Bunting without alarm. Something was coming to an end, Bunting knew, some way of life, some ordained, flawless narrative of what it meant to be alive at this moment. A cold breeze carried the strong aroma of buffalo toward him, and the sheer beauty and rightness—a formal rightness—inescapable and exact—of who and where he was went through Bunting like music, and as he sailed off into the final, the most charged and pregnant white space, he could no longer keep himself from weeping.