“Have you ever seen a barn raising or any of those episodes of country charity where the feelings of the participants are not those of obligation or even duty so much as the sheer amplitude of the heart, its cheerful, generous, almost maritime displacements buoying cause and mission like stalled shipping? Or have you ever been to a surprise party, Dr. Kinsley? Or anniversary, or testimonial dinner? Have you risen to your feet with the others in the hall to give someone who doesn’t expect it a standing ovation? Then you will recognize the inclusive, almost religious good will of such moments. There’s something in it for you, too, though it may not be what you think. It isn’t the sense of a paid-up debt or the satisfaction that is said to come from good behavior. It isn’t anything peripheral or serendipitous or spin-off or sidebar or fallout at all. That barn you helped raise is forever after your barn too, just as the surprise is your surprise—‘Were you really surprised? Did you suspect anything? What did you think when you saw all those cars in the driveway? We’d have parked on the street but all the spots were taken’—and the ovation not just a declaration of your gratitude and love but an affirmation of your taste.
“What Uncle Joe said was repeated all over the state, given motion and impetus by word-of-mouth, some relayed, passed baton or aloft torch quality of marathon unimpedance. And not just Vermont but New Hampshire too, parts of Massachusetts and Maine and New York State and corners of Connecticut.
“It was how I heard—I don’t recall who told me, some friend of a friend who’d been traveling in New England that summer—all that far away in Michigan. It wasn’t astral projection. Joe hadn’t written. His last letter had been when Elizabeth died. She was my mother’s sister, my aunt. I suppose he believed that as a nephew I had a stake in that loss. But he never wrote about Susan or his sons. Perhaps he felt cousins aren’t relatives at all, only friends. Or maybe there’s just something too sour in the death of children. Tragedy, but tragedy spoiled, gone off like meat. It wasn’t anything one would want to write letters about.
“Anyway, the response of the farmers and sportsmen was incredible. It was as if no one in Vermont could mend tack or shoe a horse except my uncle. They brought him their hobbled animals as if they were making a pilgrimage, some long, lame march to a Green Mountain Lourdes. They went out of their way to come to him and, since my uncle had expressed the wish to work alone and no longer be for them that cracker-barrel or wood or potbelly stove or general store philosopher that had gotten him into trouble in the first place, they simply turned their beasts over to him, disengaging the animals from the wagons they pulled as if they not only had come to a sort of hospital but were brought there in a sort of ambulance which they, the lame horses, had had to pull themselves, and then went off to drink or actually register for the night at the local inn. So it cost them money and time too, though possibly they didn’t see it that way, still riding the wave of that conjoined magnanimity and effluent participatory chivalry which is not only the inspiration for surprise parties but the only reason you can get people to come to them in the first place.
“They had to knock now. Then my uncle would come out to them, take their animals and damaged tack, give them a receipt (which they did not always want later to surrender, the slip of paper being the stub, the souvenir of their attendance), and lead their property back into the blacksmith shop.
“I wrote Joe when I heard what had happened and, when he didn’t answer, I wrote again. I wrote a third time, a stolid, solemn letter of patient unput-out condolence. I asked if he wanted to come to Michigan for a while. He didn’t answer.
“I would have gone to him in Vermont. In my last letter I had suggested as much, proposing it as an alternative should he not wish to make the trip to Michigan. So you see, Dr. Kinsley, there was no astral trigger finger, no metempsychotic quick-draw pyrotechnics. I have, as I’ve said, been an adept for more than five years. But I gave up joy-riding long ago. The occult airs are too chill, its weathers too tempestuous. I was forced, you see. I loved my uncle, my dead cousins. To have lost almost all of them at once, as I had casually learned I had, was simply too much. Uncle Joe wouldn’t answer his mail. Perhaps he was holed up in his grief. Perhaps he needed me. Perhaps I needed him.
“I tried to enter his dreams. He had no dreams. He slept like someone napping. I don’t mean fitfully; I don’t mean lightly; maybe I don’t even mean uncomfortably, but with just that hibernant, abeyant doze one sees on the faces of sleepers in railway carriages or in the awry angled heads of passed-out drunks. My uncle could have been an uncle in parlors after family feasts, or paralyzed, all his features—eyes, mouth, nose, forehead, cheeks, chin—in some leaden, unresisting mandragoran acedia, even his bones in coma, not piled so much as stashed unarchitecturally as firewood. Quite simply there was no one home, and his face had about it some lifeless, awful quality of nonuse, like clothes, say, in the closets of the dead.
“I entered his head through his nostrils, thinking my rubbery passage there might act like some chemical reagent, but I know dreamless sleep when I see it. He was as nerveless there as toenail, his body lulled as hair.
“I became bolder, even naughty. I entered his head through his anus, his ears, the littorals of his sex——all the watched passes and zebra-gated, checkpoint vulnerables of his ticklish borders. I would have done as well to have entered his head through his hat.
“Once inside I moved about as freely as a man in his own rooms, but with as little sense of voyage, journey. I probed his brain like a caver, but the cave was featureless, dead, the bland limestones and indigenous geologies ordinary as cellar. There was neither grief nor joy, his unconscious recessive as his hunger.
“I slipped outside again with the intention of reconnoitering his room, more cop than nephew, more scientist than mourner. I looked for——what? A Bible perhaps, open at some telling passage of consolation or bleak denunciation, or perhaps at one of those two psalms in my uncle’s repertoire that might indicate the words meant more to him than just a formula for the disposition of bodies.
“There was no Bible.
“I looked for framed photographs of my cousins, posed, frozen, idealized Sunday bested, their young lives solemnized and potentiated by their severe clothes and managed expressions, neither openly smiling nor hardened in some scam seriousness but posed nevertheless, genuinely posed, to give off their own real considered sense of who they were, all they intended to be. Or loose snapshots, deceptive candids, my cousins tricked out in life as they worked by the forge or were snapped in repose, horseplay, seated at table or dancing the jig.
“There were no framed photographs, there were no loose candids.
“I looked for memento. Not locks of hair or the stuffed toys of their childhood—I knew there wouldn’t be any—but their heights sketched with a pencil mark on the doorways and walls, or a window hairline cracked by one of them in roughhouse. For diary, journal, a note passed at school. For their lucky coins and stamp collections. For anything beside the way which had once engaged them and which now, in death, might be allowed to stand for the obscure talismanics of their father’s engagement.
“There was nothing.
“Ah, thought the astral detective, then doesn’t the persistent absence of such stuff suggest their willful repudiation? Wouldn’t Joe have gone the other way altogether, sweep away, get rid of, jettison forever all trace, spoor, vestige and relic of his all-gone family, doing the conscientious spring cleaning of death?
“No evidence warranted the assumption. In their rooms, their furniture and lives, if not just as they had left them, seemed to have been put in a more logical order, arranged, even enhanced. I had last visited three years earlier. Aunt Elizabeth was still alive. I remember Susan had remarked that she had no place to store her things. There was a chiffonier in Redford’s room. Redford himself volunteered to let Susan have the piece. Elizabeth seconded, adding that she had always thought the bureau too feminine for her eldest son anyway. Joe, however, had objected to its removal, poin
ting out that the blond finish matched the color of the bed he had built. Susan’s furniture was dark. He said that when he had time he would build her a chest of drawers of her own, one that would go with what she already had. She didn’t want to wait, she said, and, since Redford didn’t mind giving up the chiffonier, her father soon agreed. It was a heavy piece to move and I recall being drafted to help in the rearrangement of the furniture.
“Now the big chest of drawers was back in Redford’s room again, no new piece having replaced it in Susan’s.
“Such arrangements seemed universal throughout. Spreads and curtains which had been distributed with no thought to decor now complemented the beds they lay across, were assimilate with the windows from which they hung. This was not the grieved archeologist’s loving reconstruction nor even the sensitive curator’s historical placements. This——this was show business!
“But nothing in the house gave any clue to my uncle’s state of mind. Nothing about his look in sleep did. (I was with him until just before dawn. He didn’t even turn over.) Even his body—which lay on top of the sheets—seemed neutral, gently in idle like a good car at a stoplight. He could have been his own easy effigy lying on his bed like a dead pope on a sarcophagus.
“And what was his sleeping body like? What secret language did it speak? None. It was mute. (He didn’t snore, his breath was regular, even, neither shallow nor deep.) He looked like a man floating in heavily salted water. And, undressed—he was a blacksmith, a man who may even have conducted heat—naked, oddly unfit, powerful of course but with the power off plumb, like a klansman’s or bear’s or vaudeville deputy’s. His body saddened me—even his beard did, its poor dumb brush cut, the misguided bristles of rectitude and economy like primary growth on some elemental sea thing—but told me nothing.
“In a week I returned. Nothing had changed. If he hadn’t been wearing pajamas I wouldn’t have known he’d ever awakened. He was dreamless as ever. I made three more visitations. He was always dreamless, his sleep undramatic as a doll’s.
“Because it was love which brought me back, some recidivist exercise of honor and homage to an uncle blacksmith whose two women and three boys had once represented a kind of full house, anyway luck, anyway moral force, the view from the rocker, the view from the hearth, some sung song of engagement and dignity and pride, my opinion of the man not unlike my cousins’, not unlike those country peers and cronies whose spit sizzled like some tempering principle on all his blacksmith’s machinery of heat. Because only love could have made me do it, my appetite for the parlor tricks of magic and sorcery having long since been brought down, leveled and flattened, of no more interest to me, now that I could do them, than the charms of money, say, to a tired sheik. (Because I don’t know how God does it, don’t understand what’s in it for Him, why his limitless power and the limitless demands on it don’t bore Him to death.) And if you’re not God it drains you, really takes it out of you, runs down your health, grinds your teeth, there really being such a thing as beginner’s luck, those lively gushers of commencement like the hefty, undepleted reserves of sperm in a fifteen-year-old boy. I had no such energy, and each trip, each paranormal, theurgic transport told heavily on my—well, what have you?—blood, bone, skin, bowel, urine and saliva. I would return each time after my nocturnal sojourns to a body whose blood seemed to have thickened and cooled. I cut my hand, bled. Fat bubbled in globules there like oil slicks in soup. My bones burned. My skin rashed. My bowels loosened. My urine hardened, painfully scraped the walls of my urethra. My saliva congealed. I had to pick it from between my teeth with floss. What if I caught a draft? Exposed, sloped as a flier gone down on a glacier, my lungs would have shipped the pneumonic poisons like locks filling. (I shut the windows before I went to sleep, pulled the shades—this was high summer—closed the doors, arranged myself between quilts and comforters.) What if I became overheated? I would have expired of all the miasmas and malarials of Michigan concentrated in the bedroom. (And without even delirium to comfort me, my mind fled with my spirit.)
“And it has never been easy for me. Maybe I haven’t the stomach for it. Even in the beginning, when I was younger, stronger, it wasn’t easy, all that steep, uphill, roller coaster and ferris wheel verticality, all that roil and flux and vertigo, spiral roll, reel, twirl and turn giving me the staggers, shakes, totters and spastics, giving me the flutters, flops, snaps and palpitations.
“Also, frankly, it bored me. I mean the astral projection itself, if one can even think of boredom in connection with an enterprise filled with such dread and such terror, immaculate as the edge of a knife. I am afraid I am afraid of the dark.
“The trip from Michigan to Vermont is almost a thousand miles and is accomplished in time. No dimension is finessed, and even if my body is incorporeal, the Great Lakes are wet and deep, the cold night air piled with isobar, pressure, front, moisture and electrical charge. There are birds that could snap up my soul in one peck. There is gravity and the hard, wide black landscape beneath it like a net. There are rough trees and treacherous limbs and sharp-edged leaves like a dangerous vegetable cutlery. There are small animals in the grasses with their honed, predatory temperaments. There are vicious puddles of oil on the highways, noxious, cloying as quicksand. There are tile and slate roofs like strips of sulfur below my astral friction. There is the air mail. There is everywhere beneath me and all along the route of my medium impediment like land-mined space or badly laid track. There are the poisoned, awful molecules of the supernatural, and the blinded atoms of the dark.
“And once, streaming through space, I felt the presence of some ignus fatuus and could just make it out, a phosphorescent, not point, grease of light that maneuvered with me, kept pace with me, swerving to the left when I did, soaring when I soared, swooping when I swooped. I thought it might be a bird but no bird could fly at such speeds. I tried to evade it, losing my course but not my companion. I did barrel rolls, loop-the-loops, plunges, spins, stalls, slips and slides, all the dives and glides of Chagall acrobacy, but it kept up with me, I couldn’t shake it. Terrified, I climbed—I could have made it over the Rockies then—higher than I had ever climbed and, at the apogee of my endurance, suddenly leveled off, thinking to outrun it. I could still hear it, its pierce through space, but behind me now and not so loud as before.
“At the last it called out. ‘Please. Please,’ it called, ‘I’m lost. Please. Let me come with you! Please,’ it cried. ‘Something’s wrong. I can’t get back. Won’t you help me? Please,’ it wailed, ‘please!’
“It was another astral projectionist. If it hadn’t been exhausted, if it hadn’t been on its return trip, it would have caught me. It would have followed me back. It would have burrowed into the vacant body on my bed like a worm hiding in fruit.
“So of course it was love which took me there, not curiosity. If I needed to know what my uncle was feeling it was so I could console him. But he would not dream, he was dreamless. I would have to make the trip in daylight.
“Forget that I would have to face in light the thousand terrors I had merely glossed in dark, that each stone would now not only be palpable but visible, and all rough terrain writ large, the confused blur of geography, the rooftops, kids, dogs and all sharp spikes of the world present to me as temperature. Or maybe it was that height, height itself (and distance too) would become a landmark, a physical, ponderable corporeity solid as the calculable per second per second acceleration of falling bodies. Forget all my misgivings. There was still left the physics of the thing, the fixed givens of technique like the constitutional stipulations governing a presidency. The spirit may separate itself from the material plane only when the physical body is sleeping. There is that same guard-prisoner relationship one runs across in melodrama——jealousy, suspicion and the followed heart.
“I am not one of those fortunates who can nod off anywhere. I haven’t the gift of napping. Sleep is a ceremony with me. There must be weariness, yes, but also beds, night, pajamas and turned-dow
n blankets. The clocks must be wound, the house locked and the cat put out. There must be bedtime. Even when I’m ill, I’ve noticed, I find it hard to doze in the daytime. Healthy, the task is almost impossible.
“But I made the effort. I undressed as I would at night, carefully folding my shirt, still fresh—I’d put it on that morning—and hanging my suit neatly in the closet. I lined up my shoes, the toes just sticking out from beneath the bed but hiding the part where the laces begin. I put my bathrobe on over my pajamas and brought my socks, handkerchief and underwear to the laundry hamper. I emptied my bladder and brushed my teeth. I got into bed. I sighed and yawned, attempting to trick myself with the noises of ease. I was quite wakeful of course. I knew I would be. I decided to read for a bit, selecting for my reading matter not only the dullest book I could find but one I had already read. I turned on the reading lamp beside the bed, though there was light enough to read even with the shades drawn and the curtains pulled tight across the window. Wakeful as ever, it seemed to me that I was becoming hungry. I nibbled fruit, drank warm milk, grazed cold chicken. At three that afternoon I dressed, went to my office and put in three hours’ work before starting home. I repeated my efforts the next day and the next after that, and though I slept soundly at night, my insomnia disappearing at my normal hour for retiring, I was unable to sleep at all during the day.
“On the fourth day it occurred to me to try to lull myself with the habits of my childhood. I had no toys now of course, but I brought the cat into the room and encouraged it to stay beside me on the bed, a privilege it is at all other times refused. The cat was terrified and I let it go. I said my prayers. I prayed for sleep. I counted sheep. What didn’t I do? I even obtained a rather powerful sleeping draught from a pharmacist friend and took it late one morning with a cup of warm honey. The potion worked and I was soon asleep, but I had not realized that inside my drugged physical body my astral one would be narcotized too. We are a curious mix of curious psychology, Doctor, a patchwork of whim and fixed idea. I don’t know if you will understand this, or if the boy you show this letter to will, but I was more bitter about the seven wasted hours of drug-induced sleep than I was about all thirty of the wakeful, working, tossing and turning ones I had put in trying to lose consciousness.
George Mills Page 15
