Interior Darkness: Selected Stories

by Peter Straub

  He wiped his forehead. “I, uh, had a kind of funny week. Things have been affecting me in an odd way. I broke up with somebody a little while ago.”

  “Frank told me. Me, too. That’s why he thought we ought to meet each other. But I think you ought to think of another topic.”

  “I don’t have any topics,” Bunting said.

  “Guys all talk about sports. I like sports. Honest, I really do. I’m a Yankee fan from way back. And I like Islanders games. But basketball is my favorite sport. Who do you like? Larry Bird, I bet—you look like a Larry Bird type. Guys who like Larry Bird never like Michael Jordan. I don’t know why.”

  “Michael who?” Bunting said.

  “Okay, football. Phil Simms. The Jets. The good old Giants. Lawrence Taylor.”

  “I hate football.”

  “Okay, what about music? What kind of music do you like? You ever hear house music?”

  Bunting imagined a house like a child’s drawing, two windows on either side of a simple door, dancing to notes spilling from the chimney attached to its pointed roof.

  Marty tilted her head and smiled at him. “On second thought, I bet you like classical music. You sit around in your place and listen to symphonies and stuff like that. You make yourself a little martini and then you put on a little Beethoven, right? And then you’re right in the groove. I like classical music sometimes too, I think it’s good.”

  “People are too interested in sports and music,” Bunting said. “All they talk about is some game they saw on television, or some series, or some record. It’s like there isn’t anything else.”

  “You forgot one,” she said. “You forgot money.”

  “That’s right—they pay too much attention to money.”

  “So what should they pay attention to?”

  “Well…” He looked up, for the moment wholly distracted from his embarrassment and discomfort. It seemed to him that there existed an exact answer to this question, and that he knew it. “Well, more important things.” He raised his hands, as if he could catch the answer while it flew past him.

  “More important than sports, television, and music. Not to mention money.”

  “Yes. None of that is important at all—it’s worthless, when you come right down to it.”

  “So what is important?” She looked at him with her eyes narrowed behind her big glasses. “I’m dying to hear about it.”

  “Um, what’s inside us.”

  “What’s inside us? What does that mean?”

  Bunting made another large vague gesture with his hands. “I sort of think God is inside us.” This sentence came out of his mouth by itself, and it startled him as much as it did Marty. “Something like God is inside us. Outside of us, too.” Then he found a way to say it. “God is what lets us see.”

  “So, you’re religious.”

  “No, the funny thing is, I’m not. I haven’t gone to church in twenty-five years.” He flattened his hands against his eyes for a moment, then took them away. His whole face had a naked look, as if he had just taken off a pair of eyeglasses. “Let’s say you’re just walking down the street. Let’s say you’re not thinking about anything in particular. You’re trying to get to work, and you’re even a little worried about something—the rent, or the way your boss is acting, or something. You’re absolutely, completely, inside the normal world. And then something happens—a car backfires, or a woman with a gorgeous voice starts to sing behind you—and suddenly you see what’s really there—that everything, absolutely everything is alive. The whole world is one living thing, and that living thing is just beating with life. Every rock, every blade of grass, every speck of dust, every raindrop, even the windshield wipers and the headlights, it’s like you’re floating in space, no, it’s like you’re gone, disappeared, like you don’t really exist anymore in the old way at all because you’re just the same as everything else, no more alive, no more conscious, just as alive, just as conscious, everything is overflowing, light streams and pours out of every little detail…” Bunting fought down the desire to cry.

  “I’ll give you one thing, it makes a double play against Los Angeles sound pretty small.”

  “The double play would be part of it too,” he said, understanding that, too, now. “Us sitting here is part of it. We’re talking, that’s a big part of it. If churches were about what they’re supposed to be about, they’d open their windows and concentrate on us sitting here. Look at that, they’d say, look at all that beauty and feeling, look at that radiance, that incredible radiance, that’s what’s holy. But do you know what they say instead?” He hitched his chair closer to her, and took another big gulp of his drink. “Maybe they really know all this, I think some of them must know it, it must be their secret, but instead, what they say is just the opposite. The world is evil and ugly, they say—turn your back on it. You need blood, they say—you need sacrifice. We’re back to savages jumping around in front of a fire. Kill that child, kill that goat, the body is sinful and the world is bad. Ignore it long enough and you’ll get a reward in heaven. People get old believing this, they get sick and forgetful, they begin to fade out of the world without ever having seen it.”

  Marty was looking at him intently, and her mouth was open. She blinked when he stopped talking. “I can see why Frank is impressed with you. He can go on like this for hours. You must have a great time at work.”

  “We never talk about this at work. I never talked about it with anybody until now.” It came to Bunting that he was sitting at a table with a pretty woman. He was in the world and enjoying himself. He was on a date, talking. It was not a problem. He was like the men in the bar behind him, talking to their dates. He wondered if he could tell Marty about the baby bottles.

  “Didn’t you talk like this with your old girlfriend?”

  Bunting shook his head. “She was only interested in her career. She would have thought I was crazy.”

  “Well, I think you’re crazy too,” Marty said. “But that’s okay. Frank is crazy in another way, and among other, less harmless things, my old boyfriend was crazy about doo-wop music. Johnny Maestro? He worshipped Johnny Maestro. He thought it summed it all up.”

  “I suppose it did,” Bunting said. “But no more than anything else.”

  “Do you get a lot of this stuff out of books? Do you read a lot?”

  Another flare went off in Bunting’s brain, and he took another gulp of his drink, waving his free hand in the air, semaphoring that she hadn’t quite understood matters, but that he had plenty to say about her question. “Books!” he said after he had swallowed. “You wouldn’t believe what I’ve…” He shook his head. She was smiling at him. “Think about what reading a book is really like. A novel, I mean—you’re reading a novel. What’s happening? You’re in another world, right? Somebody made it, somebody selected everything in it, and so suddenly you’re not in your apartment anymore, you’re walking along this mountain road, and you’re sitting on top of a horse. You look out and see things. What you see is partly what the guy put there for you to see, and partly what you make up on the basis of that. Everything means something, because it was all chosen. Everything you see, touch, feel, smell, and everything you notice and everything you think, is organized to take you somewhere. Do you see? Everything glows! In paintings too, don’t you suppose? There’s some force pushing away at all the details, making them bulge, making them sing. Because the act of painting or writing about a leaf or a house or whatever, if the guy does it right, amounts to saying: I saw the amazing overflowing of life in this thing, and now you can see it too. So wake up!” He gestured with both arms, like a conductor calling for a great swell of sound.

  “Have you ever thought about becoming a teacher?” Marty asked. “You get all fired up, Bobby, you’d be great in a classroom.”

  “I just want to say something.” Bunting held his hands over his heart. “This is the greatest night of my life. I never really felt like this before. At least, not since I was really small, th
ree or four, or something. I feel wonderful!”

  “Well, you’re certainly not nervous anymore,” Marty said. “But I still say you’re religious.”

  “I never heard of any religion that preaches about this, did you? If you hear of one, let me know and I’ll sign up. It has to be a church that says, Don’t come in here, stay outside in the weather. Wake up and open your eyes. What we do in here, with the crosses and stuff, that’s just to remind you of what’s really sacred.”

  “You’re something else,” she said, laughing. “You and Frank Herko are quite the pair. The two of you must get that office all stirred up.”

  “Maybe we should.” For a giddy instant, Bunting saw himself and shaggy, overbearing Frank Herko conducting loud debates over the partition. He would speak as he was speaking now, and Frank would respond with delight and abandon, and the two of them would carry on their talks after work, in apartments and restaurants and bars. It was a vision of a normal and joyous life—he would call up Frank Herko at his apartment, and Frank would say, Why don’t you come over? Bring Marty, we’ll go out for dinner, have a little fun.

  Bunting and Marty were smiling at each other.

  “You’re sort of like Frank, you know. You like saying outrageous things. You’re not at all the way I thought you were when I came in. I mean, I liked you, and I thought you were interesting, but I thought it might be kind of a long evening. You don’t mind my saying that now? I really don’t want to hurt your feelings, and I shouldn’t be, because you seem so different now. I never heard anybody talk that way before, even Frank. It might be crazy, but it’s fascinating.”

  Nobody had ever told Bunting he was fascinating before this, especially not a young woman staring at him with wonderful blue eyes past a swerve of pure black hair. He realized, and this was one of the most triumphant moments of his life, that he could very likely bring this amazing young woman back to his apartment.

  Then he remembered what his apartment—his room—actually looked like, and what he had done to it.

  “Don’t start blushing again,” Marty said. “It’s just a compliment. You’re an interesting man, and you hardly know it.” She reached across the table and rested her fingers lightly on the back of his hand. “Why don’t we finish these drinks and order some food? It’s Friday. We don’t have to go anywhere else. This is fine. I’m enjoying myself.”

  Marty’s light cool fingers felt as heavy as anvils on his skin. A wave of pure guilt made him pull his hand away. She was still smiling at him, but a shadow passed behind her wonderful eyes. “I have to do something,” he said. “I shouldn’t have let myself forget,” he said. “There must be a telephone in this place somewhere.” He began looking wildly around the restaurant.

  “You have to call someone?”

  “It’s urgent, I’m sorry, I can’t believe I’ve been acting like…” Bunting wiped his face and pushed himself away from the table and stood up. He moved clumsily toward the people standing at the bar.

  “Like what?” she asked, but he was already pushing clumsily through the crowd.

  Bunting found a pay telephone outside the men’s room. He scooped change out of his pockets and stacked it up. Then he dialed the area code for Battle Creek and his parents’ number. He dropped most of the money. The phone rang and rang, and Bunting fidgeted and cupped his ear against the roar of voices from the bar.

  Finally his mother answered.

  “Mom! How are you? How’d it go?”

  “Yes, who is this?”

  “Bobby. It’s Bobby.”

  “Bobby isn’t here,” she said.

  “No, I’m Bobby, Mom. How are you feeling?”

  “Fine. Why wouldn’t I feel fine?”

  “Did you see the doctor today?”

  “Why would I see him?” She sounded sharp, almost angry. “That was stupid. I don’t have to see him, listen to your father gripe about the money for the rest of his life.”

  “Didn’t you have an appointment?”

  “Did I?”

  “I think so,” he said, feeling his grip on reality loosen.

  “Well, what if I did? This isn’t Russia. Your father wanted to bully me about the money, that’s all it is. I pretended—just sat in my car, that’s all I did. He wants to humiliate me, that’s what it is, thirty-seven years of humiliation.”

  “He didn’t go with you?”

  “He couldn’t, there wasn’t any appointment. And when I came home, I drove and drove, I kept seeing Kellogg’s and the sanitarium, but I never knew where I was and so I had to keep driving, and then, like a miracle, I saw I was turning into our street, and I was so mad at him I swore I’d never ever go to that doctor again.”

  “You got lost driving home?” His body felt hot all over.

  “Now, you stop talking about that. You sound like him. I want to know about that beautiful girlfriend of yours. Tell me about Veronica. Someday you have to bring that girl home, Bobby. We want to meet her.”

  “I’m not going out with her anymore,” Bunting said. “I wrote you.”

  “You’re just like that horrible old crosspatch. ‘Brutal’ is the word for him. Brutal all his life, brutal brutal brutal. Says things just to confuse me, and then he gets upset when I want to do a little wash, acts as if I haven’t been his punching bag for the past thirty years—”

  Bunting heard only heavy breathing for a moment. “Mom?”

  “I don’t know who you are, and I wish you’d stop calling,” she said. Bunting heard his father’s voice, loud and indistinct, and his mother said, “Oh, you can leave me alone, too.” Then he heard a startled outcry.

  “Hello, what’s going on?” Bunting said. All the sounds from Battle Creek had dwindled into a muffled silence overwhelmed by the din from the bar. His father had put his hand over the mouthpiece. This almost certainly meant he was yelling. “Someone talk to me!” Bunting shouted, and the yelling in the bar abruptly ceased. Bunting hunched his shoulders and tried to burrow into the hood over the telephone.

  “All right, who is this?” his father asked.

  “Bob, it’s Bobby,” he said.

  “You’ve got some nerve, calling out of the blue, but you never did care much about what anybody else might be going through, did you? Look, I know you’re sensitive and all that, but this isn’t the best time to give us bullshit about your little girlfriends. You got your mother all upset, and she was upset enough already, believe me.” He hung up.

  Bunting replaced the receiver. He was not at all clear about what was going on in Battle Creek. It seemed that his mother had forgotten who he was during the course of their worrying conversation. He pushed his way through the men and women at the bar and came out into the restaurant where a young woman with a round face framed in black hair was looking at him curiously from one of the rear tables. It took him a moment to remember her name. He tried to smile at her, but his face would not work right.

  “What happened to you?” she asked.

  “This isn’t…um, I can’t, ah…I’m afraid that I have to go home.”

  Her face hardened with a recognition: in an instant, all the sympathy dropped away. “We were having a nice time, and you go make a phone call, and now everything’s off?”

  Bunting shrugged and looked at his feet. “It’s a personal thing—I can’t really explain it—but, uh—”

  “But, uh, that’s it? What happened to, ‘This is the greatest night of my life’?” she squinted at him. “Oh, boy. I guess I get it. You ran out, didn’t you? You thought you could get through an evening, and then you realized you can’t, so you called your guy. And everything you said wasn’t really you, it was just—that crap you take. You’re pathetic.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bunting said. His misery seemed to be compounding itself second by second.

  “I know guys like you,” she said, her eyes blazing at him. “One in particular.” She held out an imperious hand for the checkroom ticket. “I know a few inadequate children
who can’t handle relationships, one in particular, but I thought I was all done hanging around a guy who spent half the night making phone calls and the other half in the bathroom—I guess I really am done! Because I’m going!” She retrieved her coat and shoved her arms into its sleeves. People at other tables were staring at them.

  “You must have the wrong idea about something,” Bunting said.

  “Oh, that’s good,” she said. She buttoned her coat. Her small face seemed cold, a cold white stone with a red smear near the bottom. “Sleep on it, if you do sleep, see if you can come up with something a little snappier.” Marty walked quickly through the tables, passed the lounging headwaiter, and went outside. Frigid air swept into the restaurant as the door closed on empty darkness.

  Bunting paid for the drinks and noticed that the waitress would not look directly at him. An artificial quiet had settled on the bar. Bunting put on his coat and wandered outside, feeling lost and aimless. He had no appetite. He buttoned up his coat and watched cars stream toward him down the wide avenue. A short distance to his left, the avenue ended at a massive arch which stood at the entrance to a park. He had no idea where he was. That didn’t matter: all places were the same place. Traffic continued to come toward him out of the dark, and he realized that he was in Battle Creek, Michigan—he was back in Battle Creek, downtown in the business district, a long way from home.

  10

  When Jesus flew to heaven he had wounds in his hands and feet, they had torn his flesh and killed him on a cross, there was blood on the ground, and when he rolled the rock away in his dusty robe he left bloody palm prints on the rock.

  —

  Jesus said, So you have some fucking doubts, Bobby? Take a look at this. And opened his clothes and showed Bunting the great open wound in his side. Go on, he said, stick your goddamned hand in it, stick your mitt in there, how about them goddamn apples, Bobby? You get it, you get it now, good buddy? This shit is for real.

  —

  And Jesus walked on his bleeding feet through Battle Creek, leaving his bloodstains on sidewalks unseen by assholes who had never been wounded by anything more serious than a third martini, and who had never wounded anyone else with a weapon deadlier than an insult. There was a savage grin on his face. He slammed the palm of a hand against the side of one of those little houses, and blood squirted onto the peeling paint. Holy holy holy. The palm print was holy, the flecks of paint were holy, the cries of pain and sorrow too.