Interior Darkness: Selected Stories

by Peter Straub

  Bunting let the book fall from his hands, back in a shrunken and diminished world. He experienced a long moment of pure loss from which only tremendous hunger and certain physical urgencies imperfectly distracted him. He needed, with overpowering urgency, to get into the bathroom; his legs had fallen asleep, his neck ached, and his knees creaked with pain. When he finally sat down on the toilet he actually cried out—it was as if he had gone days without moving. He realized he was incredibly thirsty, and as he sat, he forced his arms to move to the sink, take up the glass, fill it with water. He swallowed, and the water forced its way down his throat and into his chest, breaking passage for itself. The world of Shorty, the meadow of endless green, and the grazing buffalo were already swimming backward, like a long night’s dream. He was left behind in this littler, less eloquent world.

  He turned on his shower and stepped inside to soak away his pains.

  When he dried himself off, he realized that he had no proper idea of the time. Nor was he really certain of what day it was. He remembered seeing gray darkness outside his windows, so presumably it would soon be time to go to work—Bunting always awakened at the same time every day, seven-thirty, and he had no need of an alarm: but suppose that he had read very late into the night, as on the night of his birthday; had he really just finished reading the book? Living in the book, as it actually seemed? That would mean that he had not slept at all, though it seemed to Bunting that he’d had the experience of sleeping, in gullies and in a little jailhouse, in a bunkhouse and a tavern’s back room, and beside a fire in a wide meadow with millions of pinpoint stars overhead.

  He dressed in a fresh shirt, a glen plaid suit, and a pair of cracked, well-polished brown shoes. When he strapped on his watch, he saw that it was six-thirty. He had read all night long, or most of it: he supposed he must have slept now and then, and dreamed certain passages of the book. Hunger forced him out of his room as soon as he was dressed, although he was an hour early: Bunting supposed he could walk to work again and get there early enough to clean up everything from Monday. Now that he was no longer stiff, his body and his mind both felt, beneath a lingering layer of tiredness like that after a session of strenuous exercise, refreshed and energetic.

  The light in the corridor seemed darker than it should have been, and in the lobby two teenage boys who had stayed up all night sucking on crack pipes and plotting crimes shared a thin hand-rolled cigarette beside the dying fern. Bunting hurried past them to the street. It was surprisingly crowded. He had gone halfway to the diner before the fact of the crowd, the darkness, and the whole feeling of the city combined into the recognition that it was evening, not morning. An entire day had disappeared.

  Outside the diner, he bought a paper, looked at the date, and found that it was even worse than that. It was Thursday—not Tuesday: he had not left his apartment—not even his bed—for two and a half days. For something like sixty hours he had lived inside a book.

  Bunting went into the bright diner, and the man behind the cash register, who had seen him at least four mornings a week for the past ten years, gave him an odd, apprehensive look. For a second or two the counterman also seemed wary of him. Then the man recognized him, and his face relaxed. Bunting tried to smile, and realized that he was still showing the shock he had felt at the loss of those sixty hours. His smile felt like a mask.

  Bunting ordered a feta cheese omelette and a cup of coffee, and the counterman turned away toward the coffee machine. Headlines and rows of black print at Bunting’s elbow seemed to lift up from the surface of the folded newspaper and blare out at him; the whole dazzle of the restaurant surged and chimed, as if saying Wait for it, wait for it: but the counterman turned carrying a white cup brimming with black coffee, the ink sifted down into the paper, and the sense of promise and anticipation faded back down into the general bright surface of things.

  Bunting lifted the thick china cup. Its rim was chalky and abraded with use. He was at a counter where he had eaten a thousand meals; the people around him offered the combination of anonymity and familiarity that most represents safety in urban life; but Bunting wanted overwhelmingly to be in his crowded little room, flat on his unmade bed, with the nipple of a baby bottle clamped between his teeth and a book open in his hands. If there was a promised land—a Promised Land—he had lived in it from Monday night to Thursday evening.

  He was still in shock, and still frightened by the intensity of what had happened to him, but he knew more than anything else that he wanted to go back there.

  When his omelette came it was overcooked and too salty, but Bunting bolted it down so quickly he scarcely tasted it. “You were hungry,” the counterman said, and gave him his check without coming any nearer than he had to.

  Bunting came out of the restaurant into what at first looked like an utter darkness punctuated here and there by street lamps and the headlights of the cars streaming down upper Broadway. Red lights flashed off and on. A massive policeman motioned Bunting aside, away from some commotion in the middle of the sidewalk. Bunting glanced past him and saw a body curled on the pavement, another man lying almost serenely prone with his hands stapled into handcuffs. A sheet of smooth black liquid lay across half the sidewalk. The policeman moved toward him, and Bunting hurried away.

  More shocks, more disturbance—savage, pale faces came out of the dark, and cars sizzled past, honking. The red of the traffic lights burned into his eyes. All about him were creatures of another species, more animal, more instinctual, more brutal than he. They walked past him, unnoticing, flaring their lips and showing their teeth. He heard steps behind him and imagined his own body limp on the pockmarked concrete, his empty wallet tossed into the pool of his blood. The footsteps accelerated, and a white frozen panic filled Bunting’s body. He stepped sideways, and a hand fell on his shoulder.

  Bunting jumped, and a deep voice said, “Just hold it, will you?”

  Bunting looked over his shoulder at a wide brutal face filled with black dots—little holes full of darkness—and a black mustache. He nearly fainted.

  “I just wanted to ask you some questions, sir.”

  Bunting took in the uniform at the same time as he saw the amusement on the policeman’s face.

  “You came out of the diner, didn’t you, sir?”

  Bunting nodded.

  “Did you see what happened?”

  “What?”

  “The shooting, sir. Did you see a shooting?”

  Bunting was trembling. “I saw—” He stopped talking, having become aware that he had intended to say I saw myself shoot a man out west in a gunfight. He looked wildly back toward the diner. A dozen policemen stood around a roped-off area of sidewalk, and red lights flashed and spun. “I really didn’t see anything at all. I barely saw—” he gestured toward the confusion.

  The man nodded wearily and folded his notebook with a contemptuous, disbelieving snap. “Yeah,” he said. “You have a good night, sir.”

  “I didn’t see—I didn’t—”

  The policeman had already turned away.

  On Bunting’s side of the avenue, the lobby of the bank offered access to their rows of cash machines; across it, the drugstore’s windows blared out light through a display of stuffed cartoon characters. A cardboard cutout of a girl in a bathing suit held a camera. Bunting watched the policeman go back to his colleagues. Before they could begin talking about him, he ducked into the bank and removed a hundred dollars from his checking account.

  When he came out again, he went to the corner, crossed the street without looking at the police cars lined up in front of the diner, and went into the drugstore. There he bought five tubes of epoxy glue and ninety dollars’ worth of baby bottles and nipples, enough to fill a large box. He carried this awkwardly to his building, peering over the top to see where he was going.

  Bunting had to set down the box to push his button in the elevator, and again to let himself into his apartment. When he was finally safe inside his room, with the police bolt pushed
back in front of the door, his lights on, and a colorful little Ama filled with vodka in his hand, he felt his true self returning to him, ragged and shredded from his nightmare on the streets. Except for the curious tingle of anticipation that had come to him in the diner, everything since being driven from his room by hunger had been like being attacked and beaten. Bunting could not even remember buying all the bottles and nipples, which had taken place in a tense, driven flurry.

  Bunting began unpacking the baby bottles from the giant box, now and then stopping to suck cold Popov from the Ama. When he got to sixty-five, he saw that he was only one layer from the bottom, and was immediately sorry that he had not taken another hundred from the cash machine. He was going to need at least twice as many bottles to fulfill his plan, unless he spaced them out. He did not want to space them out, he wanted a nice tight look. A nice tight look was essential: a kind of blanketing effect.

  Bunting thought he would try to do as much this night as he could with what he had, then get more money from the bank tomorrow evening and see how far another seventy or eighty bottles got him. When he was done tonight, he would read some more, not The Buffalo Hunter again, but some other novel, to see if the same incredible state of grace, like the ultimate movie, would come to him.

  Bunting did not understand how, but what he wanted to do with all the new baby bottles was tied to what had happened to him when he read the Luke Short novel. It had to do with…with inwardness. That was as close as he could come to defining the connection. They led him inward, and inward was where everything important lay. He felt that though his entire way of life could be seen as a demonstration of this principle, he had never really understood it before—never seen it clearly. And he thought that this insight must have been what he felt coming toward him in the coffee shop: what mattered about his life took place entirely in this room.

  When all the bottles were out of the box, Bunting began slicing open the packages of nipples and attaching the nipples to the bottles. When this was done, he opened a tube of epoxy and put a few dots on the base of one of the bottles. Then he pressed the bottle to the corner of the blank wall and held it there until it stuck. At last he lowered his arm and stepped away. The pink-tipped bottle adhered to the wall and jutted out into the room like an illusion. It took Bunting’s breath away. The bottle appeared to be on the point of shooting or dripping milk, juice, water, vodka, any sort of fluid onto anyone in front of it. He dotted epoxy onto the base of another bottle and held it to the wall snugly alongside the first.

  An hour and a half later, when he ran out of new bottles, more than a third of the wall was covered: perfectly aligned horizontal bottles and jutting nipples marched along its surface from the entrance to the kitchen alcove to the door frame. Bunting’s arms ached from holding the bottles to the wall, but he wished that he could finish the wall and go on to another. Beautiful now, the wall would be even more beautiful when finished.

  Bunting stretched and yawned and went to the sink to wash his hands. A number of roaches ambled into their hiding places, and Bunting decided to wash the stacked dishes and glasses before the roaches started crowding each other out of the sink. He had his hands deep in soapy water when a thought disquieted him: he had not thought about the loss of all Tuesday, all Wednesday, and most of Thursday since buying the box of nipples and bottles, but what if his radical redecoration of his apartment was no more than a reaction to that loss?

  But that was the viewpoint of another kind of mind. The world in which he went to work and came home was the world of public life. In that world, according to people like his father and Frank Herko, one “counted,” “amounted to something,” or did not. For a dizzy second, Bunting imagined himself entirely renouncing this worthless, superficial world to become a Magellan of the interior.

  At that moment the telephone rang. Bunting dried his hands on the greasy dish towel, picked up the phone, and heard his father pronouncing his name as if he were grinding it to powder. Bunting’s heart stopped. The world had heard him. This unnerving impression was strong enough to keep him from taking in the meaning of his father’s first few sentences.

  “She fell down again?” he finally said.

  “Yeah, something wrong with your ears? I just said that.”

  “Did she hurt herself?”

  “About the same as before,” his father said. “Like I say, I just thought you ought to know about stuff like this, when it happens.”

  “Well, is she bruised? Is her knee injured?”

  “No, she mainly fell on her face this time, but her knee’s just the same. She wears that big bandage on it, you know, probably kept her from busting the knee all up.”

  “What’s making her fall down?” Bunting asked. “What does the doctor say?”

  “I don’t know, he don’t say much at all. We’re taking her in for some tests Friday, probably find out something then.”

  “Can I talk to her?”

  “Nah, she’s down in the basement, washing clothes. That’s why I could call—she didn’t even want me to tell you about what happened. She’s on this washing thing now, she does the wash two, three times a day. Once I caught her going downstairs with a dish towel, she was going to put it in the machine.”

  Bunting glanced at his own filthy dish towel. “Why does she—what is she trying to—?”

  “She forgets,” his father said. “That’s it, pure and simple. She forgets.”

  “Should I come out there? Is there anything I could do?”

  “You made it pretty clear you couldn’t come here, Bobby. We got your letter, you know, about Veronica and Carol and the rent and everything else. You tell us you got a busy social life, you tell us you got a steady job but you don’t have much extra money. That’s your life. And what could you do anyhow?”

  Bunting said, “Not much, I guess,” feeling stung and dismissed by this summary.

  “Nothing,” his father said. “I can do everything that has to be done. If she does the wash twice a day, what’s the big deal? That’s okay with me. We got the doctor appointment Friday, that’s all set. And what’s he going to say? Take it easy, that’s what, and it’ll cost us thirty-five bucks to hear this guy telling your mother to take it easy. So as far as we know yet, everything’s basically okay. I just wanted to keep you up to date. Glad I caught you in.”

  “Oh, sure. Me, too.”

  “ ’Cause you must be out a lot these days, huh? You must get out even more than you used to, right?”

  “I’m not sure,” Bunting said.

  “I never could get a straight answer out of you, Bobby,” his father said. “Sometimes I wonder if you know how to give one. I been calling you for two days, and all you say is I’m not sure. Anyhow, keep in touch.”

  Bunting promised to keep in touch, and his father cleared his throat and hung up without actually saying good-bye.

  Bunting sat staring at the telephone receiver for a long time, barely conscious of what he was doing, not thinking and not aware of not thinking. He could remember what he had been doing before the telephone rang: he had been puffed up with self-importance, it seemed to him now, as inflated as a bullfrog. He pictured his mother trotting down the basement stairs toward the washing machine with a single dish towel in her hands. Her bruised face was knotted with worry, and a thick white pad had been clamped to her knee with a tightly rolled Ace bandage. She looked as driven as if she held a dying baby. He saw her drop the cloth into the washing machine, pour in a cup of Oxydol, close the lid, and punch the starting button. Then what did she do? Nod and walk away, satisfied that one tiny scrap of the universe had been nailed into place? Go upstairs and wander around in search of another dishcloth, a single sock, a handkerchief?

  Did she fall down inside the house?

  He set the receiver back in its cradle and stood up. Before he knew he intended to go there, he was across the room and in front of the rows of bottles. He spread his arms and leaned forward. Rubber nipples pressed against his forehead, his c
losed eyes, cheeks, shoulders, and chest. He turned his face sideways, spread his arms, and moved in tighter. It was something like lying on a fakir’s bed of nails, he thought. It was pretty good. It wasn’t bad at all. He liked it. The nipples were harder than expected, but not painfully hard. Not a single bottle moved—the epoxy clamped them to the wall. Nothing would get these bottles off the wall, short of a blowtorch or a cold chisel. Bunting was slightly in awe of what he had done. He sighed. She forgets. That’s it, pure and simple. Tough little nipples pressed lightly against the palms of his hands. He began to feel better. His father’s voice and the image of his mother darting downstairs to drop a single cloth into the washing machine receded to a safe distance. He straightened up and passed his palms over the rows of nipples, which flattened against his skin and then bounced back into position. Tomorrow he would have to go to the bank and withdraw more money. Another hundred to hundred and fifty would finish the wall.

  He couldn’t go to Battle Creek, anyhow; it would be a waste of time. His mother already had an appointment with a doctor.

  He backed away from the wall. The image of the fakir’s bed resurfaced in his mind: nails, blood leaking from punctured skin. He shook it off by taking a long drink from the Ama. The vodka burned all the way down his throat. Bunting realized that he was slightly drunk.