The Storm at the Door

by Stefan Merrill Block

  Huh.

  Once, this was years ago, I lived alone in that house. This was before they had checks all the time, when we could still roam about as we pleased. They used to give us our own keys!

  Ha! Really?

  I don’t think you understand. Keys. I had my own keys, Marvin says. When they kicked me out of my house, I buried a box.

  Frederick is smiling now.

  I can’t guarantee anything, but the lock on that door looks pretty old, huh?

  Frederick nearly yelps a giddy laugh.

  It sure does look old, he agrees.

  6

  To get to the box was a simple thing, far simpler than Frederick had expected. Canon may have issued his revised protocols, but he has not stanched the spread of dereliction that had opened in his absence. Daily, the patients now manage a thousand tiny transgressions: pills slipped down shirtsleeves, unapproved food brought back to the halls in exchange for a few pilfered Miltowns, even—it is rumored—a couple of conjugal visits in South Webster, purchased with who knows what. When Frederick learned of Marvin’s buried box, his mind had run over the texture of his daily schedule, feeling it for weaknesses. Perhaps he could ask for special permission to take a walk, but at best he would be allowed the walk only if another patient also wanted to go, and then only under the direct supervision of a chaperone. His greatest chance, he reasoned, would come when he passed Marvin’s old cottage—presently in the slow process of conversion into a building for arts and craft therapy—on the march back from dinner. On the way to dinner, the Crew Crew were always alert, vigilant for potential outbursts of their patients, irritable with hunger. But after dinner, the walk was often a placid stroll, the men sated and drugged. Typically, in the last weeks, the Crew Crew shared cigarettes and laughed on these walks. Once, Frederick had witnessed them pass a flask among themselves.

  Under the cover of the dark, with the Crew Crew both relaxed and increasingly derelict, it was simple for Frederick—who managed to keep his faculties by furtively tucking his pills up his nostrils—to slide behind a tree when no one was looking.

  And so, presently, the Crew Crew and the men of Ingersoll continue the slow procession onward, leaving Frederick behind. Frederick watches two security boys patrolling along the side of the Depression; he knows he does not have long.

  Frederick approaches the spot Marvin described to him, the cottage’s southwestern cornerstone. He kneels down to it and shoves the block with his palm. And then there it is, within a hollow of the masonry: a tin lunch box, which—slightly breaking Frederick’s heart—displays a rusting image of Carmen Miranda. Frederick rests the box on his thighs and opens it to discover, as promised, the key chain, a considerable roll of twenty-dollar bills, and the third object, about which Marvin made Frederick swear promises.

  There’s something else in the box, Marvin told him. My father brought it to me when I was a boy. What did he expect me to do with it? I can’t let myself think of that. Well, you’ll see. Just please leave it there, and put the box back when you’re done. Promise me.

  Okay.

  Promise me, or I won’t tell you where it is. You’re going to want to get rid of it, but you have to promise. Promise.

  I promise, Frederick said, but already now he considers breaking that promise. It is, as he should have suspected, a pistol. Frederick thinks of Marvin’s unburned left hand, what he could do with it, as soon as he is well enough to make his way back to his box.

  Frederick examines the pistol, military-issued. He hasn’t held a firearm since his faltering naval service, and the sudden weight of it in his hand surprises him.

  He’s never considered it, not really. Yes, he has starved himself to near death, has gotten himself so badly drunk, before driving home, that even a straight line was a tremendous effort. Still, whenever he has heard the news of a suicide, he has thought Cowardice! in the same instant, unthinking way that the sight of the inordinately beautiful spurs him to the word vapid! And perhaps, he thinks now, he has been right, perhaps everyone must walk the same tenuous bridge over the same rushing water, but most have the fortitude not to look down.

  But, then, maybe he has been the cowardly one, so often prostrating himself before death, but hoping that it, not he, would swing the final blow. But now the gun is in his hand, and Frederick thinks again, it is as simple as this.

  The traffic rumbles and hisses around the base of the hill. Autumn flowers still manage to bloom in the garden below the cottage’s bay windows. The moonlight, blue and vivid, casts the otherworldly shadows of a movie-bright night. The dying grass dampens his pants. These things are not on top of him now, pressing with the weight of their demands. Nor are they beneath him, seemingly assembled to allow him some revelation. Sitting here, gun in hand, for the first time, in a great while, he feels in between.

  It is as simple as this. You put a pistol to your head and you squeeze. The static continues. Still there will be birth, life, death. Still moonlight and flowers and girls and families. Still love and resentment. But a single squeeze and you enter it in a different and unknowable way.

  He is not serious, not really. He wants only the closeness of it. To know he could have that power. He spins the revolver, until one of its three bullets disappears behind the barrel. Then he presses it to his temple with his palm, and feels the pressure of its metallic kiss. Something within him accelerates.

  Words come to him, a common construction, but incontrovertibly true. I have failed, Frederick thinks. And then, there is the same foreign need as before, the need that is not quite for a sneeze, or for a kiss, or for a sob. He moves the barrel of the gun to where his face seems to crave it.

  Even if he manages to escape, to make it all the way to Katharine and his girls, could he possibly convince his wife that he belongs there with her again? Could he possibly persuade her to convince whomever she must: Canon, the police, the board of Mayflower? How many times, already, has he convinced Katharine of his contrition, of his renascent ambitions, of his lucidity, and then failed again? Again and again, he has failed, in the average, boring ways. He has thought only of what her love promised him, what the love of his girls promised him. But the promise was reciprocal, and he has failed it. Not because of his thwarted ambitions, or even, directly, because of his infidelities; Frederick has failed because where others can sustain, can believe in something they spend their lives constructing, he cannot remain anything for long. He has never found a way for what is within him to coincide with what is beyond him.

  His palm is damp on the handle; he realizes that he is now lying down, in a patch of the dying grass, looking at the stars through what is left of the leaves.

  Insects, trees, animals, people, all carrying on with the same inexplicable imperative: live, live, live. Bats, leaves, grass, a man crying out from Ingersoll. Everything will continue still, without him. Katharine. Katharine. My girls.

  No.

  Frederick has broken many promises, and he will break one more. Scuttling away in a crouch, he rounds the corner to the cottage’s rear, where it overlooks the fall of the hill, dense with bramble, at the base of which car headlights etch the shape of Pleasant Street. He grasps the revolver by the handle and breaks his promise, the pistol landing somewhere in the inscrutable dark brush.

  7

  When Frederick returns, walking right up to the front door like some sociable neighbor dropping by, he is admitted by the Crew Crew boys, who, stunned at his escape, inform him that they could make his life hell. To expedite their empty scolding, Frederick tries not to smile. Worried the keys might give themselves away with a jangle, Frederick palms them in his pocket. Back in his room, he dangles the keys before Schultz, like a sixteen-year-old proposing a joyride.

  For fear of word reaching the Crew Crew, Frederick and Schultz agree they cannot make the farewells to the other men that they would like to make. The two simply offer Marvin their thanks (Good-bye, he replies, in a wistful, conclusive tone), gather a few of their things, and wai
t for the Crew Crew to complete the final round of checks. At 6:00 A.M., the orderlies return to their office, to complete the paperwork before the morning shift arrives. Marking their forms, the boys fail to notice Frederick and Schultz creep out to the locked door. Frederick pulls the keys from his pocket and inserts one after another, until, a quarter of the way through the chain, one fits and turns.

  8

  The Tunnels. Some lined with dusted decay, others given over to the storage of abandoned attempts to rein in madness. Perhaps some of these objects are no more ridiculous than Canon’s modern, Freudian notions, but in their historical remove, they would be laughable if they were not so horrific. The rotting wood of cold-water chambers. The rusting shackles of ancient confinement beds. Rows of glass jars, holding the dust of what were once thousands of leeches. A considerable collection of laudanum elixirs. A profusion of decaying douche bags. In a room just beneath Canon’s office, Frederick and Schultz pass a storage closet where a bit of early dawn light just manages through a half-buried window above to allow a glimpse of dozens of shelves lined with human skulls. Stony way curves into dim stony way, some leading to dead ends, where the original architects perhaps believed buildings would one day rise. Frederick and Schultz pace these corridors now, trying to navigate, by their whirling internal compasses, the way that leads out.

  Before returning to Ingersoll, Frederick had considered, just for a moment, making this escape on his own. He worried for his obviously delusional roommate, and what he might do once free. Though he betrayed no skepticism to Schultz, Frederick did wonder at the veracity of his roommate’s story of his son. But Frederick reminded himself that this place has failed Schultz as surely as it has failed him. Perhaps it was even a heroic act, liberating Schultz from Mayflower, where his obsessions seem only to deepen. But down here, in Mayflower’s labyrinthine Id, it is Schultz who takes the lead. Frederick does not have the perspicuity now to consider how Schultz marches through these tunnels with the beatific certainty of a vision quest, not the anxiety of a long-overdue family reunion. In these convoluted, dark passageways, in this fearsome funhouse of Victorian curios, Frederick is grateful for the professor’s confidence that guides them.

  There, at the end of another corridor, is a doorway, rimmed with sunlight. Sometimes, a moment arrives this way, chance offering up an immaculate metaphor. Behind Frederick is convolution, dark way after dark way, a subterranean netherworld, all musty and moribund, ignored by most but still existent. And here, just now, that darkness is shot through with the first rays of daylight. It is like when Frederick walked out on the White Paper Company after they failed to promote him, like the three or four times he has abandoned his attempts to write a book. The self-mercy of relinquishing an impossible project. There will be a new project now. He will go to Katharine, and he will convince her. And then, together, they will convince whomever else they must convince. In this new clarity, he will do these things.

  Schultz, at this moment, knows the converse of Frederick’s pleasure, the incomparably more complex satisfaction of accomplishment. He has completed his toiling decades, and now he alone is responsible for what he has wrought. From its place off of the eastern horizon, the sun exposes itself to the city of Boston, which is suddenly luminous.

  9

  But the exultant feeling does not last long. Scrambling down the hill into Belmont, Schultz and Frederick are not yet pursued by anything other than the idea of pursuit, but they nearly stumble, time and again, as they search among the denuded trees and granite boulders for any sight of their would-be captors.

  The two calm slightly once they reach the sidewalk opposite Madhouse Hill. In the time before Canon, the men of Ingersoll sometimes went down into Belmont, when the old orderlies would take them for a movie or an ice cream, like an elementary school field trip. But they had let themselves be treated as children then, leaving the navigation entirely to the authorities, as they concerned themselves with one another and the looks given by the people in town.

  And so now, without exchanging words, Frederick and Schultz simply walk along the road in a direction chosen at random, determined only to increase their distance from Mayflower. The appearance of a bus shelter, just down Trapelo Road, seems at first a mirage, too wonderful to be true.

  They sit on the shelter’s bench and then attempt, in whatever strained nonchalance two escapees of a mental hospital can muster, to wait like any other pedestrians. To their relief a bus arrives and they board.

  In the suburban morning hush at the back of the bus, Schultz turns to Frederick and speaks. You will come with me, yes? My son will help you. To get where you need to go.

  Frederick will later wish he had spent more time considering Schultz’s offer. But at this moment, stunned by the success of their escape, he forgets whatever vague semblance of his own plan he might have had; he is grateful for any plan, even a schizophrenic’s.

  Where is he?

  Downtown. I know the building.

  Frederick nods.

  He will help you. You will see.

  They are bound eastward on Interstate 90, and when the highway rises to a squat summit, they receive another clear view of Boston.

  He’s there, Schultz tells Frederick. My son is in that tower.

  Frederick, not entirely aware, simply thinks he now has the answer for his roommate’s previously inexplicable fascination with Boston’s colossal new tower.

  He was so certain, Frederick will later try to convince himself. He was so certain of what he would do that Schultz would have found his own way there. But, still, Frederick will know that it was he, not holy-eyed Schultz, who was responsible for navigating the series of transfers that brought them to the T station at the tower’s base.

  10

  They emerge from the subway to the awesome sight. For Frederick and Schultz, as for all New Englanders with eyes trained to the low altitudes of brownstones and carriage houses, the steel and glass monolith astonishes.

  Any flicker of doubt Schultz may have had is extinguished by what now stands before him. This city scene is near deafening in his strange perception: the cars speeding past with a gareeej, each of the passing men and women transmitting his or her own unique name, while the magazines they hold fiffififif, the cigarettes they smoke keeee. But there, before them, is the tower, singing out to Schultz, like a prima donna’s voice cutting through a preshow murmur without the warning of a rising curtain. It has taken thousands of years, humanity has nearly obliterated itself many times over on the way, but at last they have done it again. It is a thing made by people, but of the same name as the universe in its totality. Om.

  Still anxiously vigilant for pursuers, Frederick expects the tower’s lobby to be populated with skeptical and stern security guards. Instead, what they discover upon entering are only a few passing pedestrians, overwhelmed to silence by the glistening magnitude of the space: the polished marble floors, the immaculate steel elevators, the spotless glass, all so modern as to seem anachronistic, as if this were not a room in the present, but a room in which the future will take place. Schultz surges ahead of Frederick.

  Don’t you want to check the directory board? Frederick asks, but Schultz does not respond, merely continues to the bank of elevators.

  Frederick just barely makes it into the elevator car with Schultz before the doors close. But Schultz doesn’t notice as he scrutinizes the panel of buttons. He pushes the button with the highest number, fifty-two.

  Really? Frederick asks. He’s on the top floor?

  Schultz doesn’t answer. He cannot hear Frederick; this building is too loud with the name of what people have finally achieved once more. Each faultless slab of marble, each poured steel girder, each pane of glass, all coalescing into an Om in perfect harmony with the cosmos. And now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

  His son isn’t here, Frederick knows. But what can he do now? Schultz’s increasingly audible mutters already draw the quizzical gazes of t
he two other men sharing the elevator. Frederick senses that, if he tried to derail Schultz’s mission, Schultz would react in some exaggerated way. It wouldn’t take much—a walkie-talkie, a phone call, a couple of police officers—to restore them to Mayflower. When the doors open on thirty-five to let out the others, Frederick nearly resolves to force Schultz out as well, but he decides against it. He decides, instead, to allow Schultz to pursue whatever he has come to pursue on the top floor, where Frederick will try quietly to cajole him back to the elevator. And then what? Perhaps he will simply hand Schultz a few of Marvin’s twenty-dollar bills, then set off on his own for the bus station and New Hampshire. The elevator dings at floor fifty-two.

  11

  Soon, the scene that now opens will be a lead story in the Boston papers; soon, it will be the great news of the weekend to come. On a Friday morning, in the city’s newest tower, two escapees from the Mayflower Home arrive on the top floor, near the doors of Top of the World, Boston’s new restaurant in the sky, in which men and women bearing Boston’s proud names—those Winthrops, and Kennedys, and also Lowells—breakfast atop their city.

  Schultz immediately darts from the elevator and away from Frederick with a swiftness that Frederick would not have thought his old body could muster. Schultz seems to know precisely where to find the emergency stairwell, down a little corridor to the left of the restaurant. Schultz and Frederick bypass the rattle and chatter of breakfast service, but many of the diners will soon invent stories of seeing the men, with their crazed expressions.

  Shit, Frederick says. Shit.

  Schultz is already in the stairwell. Frederick, trying not to further rouse suspicions, lags behind in the corridor, following Schultz as swiftly as he will allow himself.