Nocturnals

by Edited by Bradford Morrow

  The dream

  … in which I might have crossed the known world in a dirigible—at night looking for the right way—

  strange light of the end, understood somehow in advance.

  One day on some deathbed will that be the realization …

  something quite else.

  I had wanted something quite else. More spacious, perhaps. Not this.

  and that weirdly all along I had had inklings—was on the right track as it were, but—

  These solstice intimations—

  ah, the door

  The Hour of the Wolf is fast upon us. In a whisper. The hour before night and dawn: when most people die, when sleep is the deepest, when nightmares feel most real. The hour when the demons are most powerful. It’s also the hour when most children are born.

  Quoted immaculately Kristen!

  And Jefferson now bends his head and says a small prayer courtesy of Emily Dickinson. And lifts a glass:

  Of God we ask one favor,

  That we may be forgiven—

  For what, he is presumed to know—

  The Crime, from us, is hidden—

  Immured the whole of Life

  Within a magic Prison

  We reprimand the Happiness

  That too competes with Heaven.

  A shadowy figure comes from a foyer or hallway into the dimly lit parlor, dusting off the snow. Who is this young woman we don’t know—someone’s prodigal daughter, or lover perhaps. Or maybe she is coming to greet herself, returned from psychic exile, disguised.

  Do come in.

  See how the night doth enfold us.

  Priscilla fresh from the Met Opera chorus.

  Humming

  Adrift in the night nursery now. The Wonder Children who were conceived with virgins and deities—with power from both worlds—

  our protectors, our salvation, whose appearance is made manifest the darkest time of the year.

  Awaited through human time: Osiris, Mithras, Apollo, Attis, the Christ child.

  Born in the dark, emanating light for as long as the world has existed,

  Illuminated by a star, a moon, a silver cup

  The season promised their reappearance if only in the mind, and putting the last of the babies to bed, one could not help think of all the Wonder Children—and soon the nursery was populated, cribs aglow.

  Ava at the periphery.

  Earlier in the evening, for the children, Joseph had dressed as Père Noël.

  And the Santa Lucia girls sang.

  Cloudberries afloat in a pewter bowl aren’t they lovely Lucinda!

  Wrapped in the night’s velvet—its lushness, its quiet, its irrefutable beauty.

  One loves the world.

  And in the end, would like to live again—if it were an option.

  One loves the night world—

  The children now asleep under the paper roses.

  The children growing as they sleep, that is what I find so remarkable

  And outside the winter roses

  Growing beneath the snow

  The candle flickers

  And Misty the neighbor’s cat flickers as she walks past soundlessly on padded paws looking for Mr. Black—

  The lullaby, the candle, the cat—the tangible presence of Mystery among us …

  This strange pull both forward and back—

  Downstairs, all move to the door, the bonfire, and the next house: the Rokeby Mansion.

  The night on our fur, Olaf, proclaims!

  Ava it’s time, someone sings sweetly from the bottom of the stairway.

  And so it is.

  Neighbor

  Daniel Torday

  We had considered trying to 302 Rosie for ages. She was clearly sick. In the beginning she would just stand outside her house every night yelling, “MRI trash,” or “MRI liar.” Soon after the sun went down she yelled it on a loop at anyone who passed. Sometimes we would be hosting a party and people would come in saying, “I think your skinny neighbor across the street is calling people white trash.” We thought that’s what she was saying at first too. This little Philadelphia neighborhood where we live is one of the most inviting in the country. New York folks call it the Sixth Borough. Property values are solid, but not likely to rise much. You can go out at night and not worry about it. Even if you’re not walking a dog. People are kind to each other—and not in some forced way.

  When it was just the “MRI trash” loop each night, discussion of trying to have Rosie committed was speculation. My wife is a lawyer. She knows how these things can go. Anyone can 302 anyone in the broad light of day—you just have to call the police, tell them you’re certain someone you know is severely mentally ill and poses a threat to you or themselves or both, and if the police agree they’ll institutionalize them against their will. But then you have to go to a 302 court to keep them in custody. It’s ugly business, and I won’t lie: the idea of a bunch of neighbors standing around one night watching as the cops pulled their young mentally ill neighbor out of her house, against her will, was not appealing. These were the lines we didn’t cross, norms that kept us living together in peace. Like the way you might knock on a door to borrow some cumin in the dense light at 6:00 p.m., but you wouldn’t even approach through the thin sodium light of streetlights at ten. Rosie lived in one of those narrow, tall row houses you find all over Philly and we lived across the street in a single, and at first we could ignore her, hoping it wouldn’t get worse. Hoping we could just sleep through it.

  It got worse.

  One of the neighbors to the left of Rosie, Isabella, stopped me as I was getting into my car one morning. It was midwinter, February, a time when being a good neighbor meant not talking to each other—make coffee, scrape frost from the windshield or clear snow, get kids in the car and off to day care. It was still so dark when we left for work each morning you might as well have called it night. A couple stars and maybe a satellite skittering across the black morning sky. But I was on my way through the murky black and Isabella came plodding across our narrow one-way street. I was clipping our youngest into her car seat.

  “Rosie’s becoming bigger trouble,” she said.

  “I know,” I said.

  I didn’t. My two-year-old was squirming in her seat like she was trying to get away from a nightmare—in psychiatry they called it “responding to internal stimuli.” If an adult responded to internal stimuli it was a problem. But two-year-olds responded to internal stimuli all the time. They toddled through their days as if in some long waking dream. It seemed a facet of being two that there was no discernment between what was internal and what was external. No day, no night. Our sleep effaced to match it. And now we were up getting on with the day, and here she was starting to cry.

  “No, like a lot louder,” Isabella said. “She was up all night, slamming some jawn against our common wall. I think she was stacking her furniture. And yelling. She just sits playing video games all night, yelling. Now she’s yelling about, ‘Gonna slit your throat.’ Maybe it’s at the TV. Maybe it’s at us. It’s scary.”

  I told her we’d keep an eye out. I got the kid into her car seat and she was crying bloody murder, her little legs kicking at the air like she was trying to swim. She kicked and squirmed something fierce in my arms, trying to escape my grasp, until I finally got around and into my seat and got driving. Who knows which of our neighbors witnessed that ugliness, but they knew enough not to mention it.

  Spring came early. Some mornings now it was light enough when we left for work that you could see straight across to the houses on the other side of the street. All the neighbors were outside in the lengthening evenings. We sat in our backyard eating grilled burgers and next door they did the same, only a fence crawling with privet, vine, and honeysuckle between us, and pretended we didn’t hear each other talking. Invented some dark-matter boundary to keep us separate.

  Across the street, Rosie was deteriorating.

  She stood out front sweeping all night. Ev
en in the thin sodium light you could see her skin was all psoriatic. She wore an olive-green Israeli army jacket. She had black Glad bags wrapped and tied around both her elbows and her knees as if to slip undetected into our dreams. She wore a burgundy beret low over her narrow brown eyes. She was probably thirty, our age to the day maybe, but she was so wiry she seemed ageless. It was as if her life comprised only nights. Like she was living half a life, the dark half. It wasn’t that she wasn’t functional—we’d see her out on Lincoln Drive riding her bike, signaled by the flash of our headlights on her reflectors, and she could’ve been anyone. Neighbor, tourist, compos mentis or otherwise, it wouldn’t have mattered, and it didn’t. Then she’d come back to her house. We wouldn’t see her until night fell, when she would stand outside sweeping her front walk. Her front lawn was a brown muck of no grass. This was Mount Airy, where people take pride in their front yards, tiny spits of land peppered with daylilies and echinacea, mums in the fall and sedum all summer. Yards lousy with tomato plants, dogwood, and lilac. Vegetables requiring full sun. Tasteful solar-powered incandescent lawn ornaments. Decorations as much to say to the neighborhood, We care for what you’re looking at, as to make ourselves happy.

  All the trimmings of what people look at during the day. Even in a city neighborhood like ours, the night belongs inside. Inside houses, inside of bars and restaurants.

  All Rosie did was stand out front sweeping all night and saying, “MRI liar, gonna slit your throat” to everyone who walked past on their way from a bar or an apartment or a house. One night I was taking the trash out, remembered it just before bed, when a couple of guys came down the block near midnight, drunk from a night at McMenamin’s around the corner. I was out front stuffing mucked leaves from the previous fall into yard bags.

  “The fuck you say to me?” I heard one of the guys say. He was wearing one of those all-black McNabb jerseys. It was the week after Easter. Rosie was back to her sweeping, eyes to the sidewalk, and the guys started walking down the block when again she said, “Motherfucker gonna slit your throat and yours too.” McNabb jersey walked back up the block and started to make a move toward her. The other half grabbed his shoulder but the first one kept moving toward her until I was in the middle of the street yelling, “Hey—hey, guys. She’s sick. Leave her alone.”

  McNabb finally stopped in his tracks. He looked at me across the way. Probably he could only half make out what I looked like in the foreshortened lengths of dark. What do you think he was thinking? I’m not asking rhetorically. I really want to know. I had a decent idea of what our neighbors thought, recluses or affable, would-you-be-my/could-you-be-my or something-there-is-that-doesn’t-love-a-wall, from the time we’d spent living around them. You learned to talk to some people and grant others the courtesy of leaving them alone. But now standing in the middle of the street trying to call a couple of drunk sweatpanted guys away from your schizophrenic neighbor while your kids are inside trying on dreams is something else. Or is it the thing itself? Learning to live with neighbors is a big part of learning to live. You learn early on how to do it in the light of day. It’s a marathon task learning to live with them in your dream life.

  McNabb sobered a bit and looked at me, then back at Rosie.

  “Well, someone ought to lock her up if she’s gonna fucking yell at people like that,” he said. “If you’re gonna take care of her, fucking take care of her.”

  By early June something was going to give. Every night all night Rosie stood outside sweeping, saying, “Liar gonna slit your throat motherfucker don’t.” Jim and Isabella had kids as small as ours. Every night while they were trying to sleep, she’d be standing out there on her stoop sweeping. You could call the cops but all they’d tell you is that sweeping is not disturbing the peace.

  “It’s getting to be such a problem,” Isabella said when I saw her one Wednesday afternoon. We don’t see each other much in the winter when it’s so cold it feels like the two-year-old’s fingers might freeze off like little freeze pops if you don’t get her inside pronto, but in the summer, that block is like its own little pro bono summer camp after summer camp ends for the day. Feels halfway like the sun will never leave. If you need to leave your kids for an hour to run an errand, someone’s there to watch. Our next-door neighbors leave for Jerusalem for the summer and they have a little square of red-painted benches around a Japanese red maple. The kids all hop up on the benches and run around in circles, chasing each other until one falls off and skins a knee, while the adults drink a beer and wait for it to get late enough to put them to bed.

  Now knowing that as soon as we all went in with the dark, Rosie would be back out with the street sweeping and gonna-slit-your-throating. Not every night. But a lot of the nights. More than not by this Wednesday in June.

  “So Jim and I have decided with Michele and Nefrali that we’re gonna call the cops every time she threatens us,” Isabella said.

  Mikey Jr. from a couple doors down said, “The cops will say there’s nothing they can do.” Mikey grew up on the block, so people are deferential. He’s been at it longer than any of us, and knows best how. Sometimes he’ll bring in your trash cans for you, help with landscaping. Carry in your groceries without your asking.

  Isabella said she knew, she knew. “Youse can do whatever you need. But us, we’re gonna call the cops. At the least, if we decide to 302 her”—she stared at me for a second after saying it—“then we’ll have a record of having made complaints.” So what could I do? Jen was still at work. We were talking, we were neighbors, our kids were playing together, and Rosie was across the street ready to start sweeping and threatening to slit our throats.

  So began a summer of red-and-blue flashing lights unnighting the night. When she got home, Jen said I should start a document on my desktop. A list of the times I’d called and the things I’d seen Rosie do and say. “A Word file will be time-stamped,” Jen said. “You’ll have a record.”

  I called the cops myself for the first time the following week. I was carrying in some groceries after the kids finally went down, and Rosie was out sweeping and she said, “MRI liar motherfucker gonna slit your throat.” I stood up and walked to the edge of our sidewalk and I said, “Listen, Rosie, I don’t want to have to do it, but if you can’t stop yelling I’m gonna have to call the cops.”

  She stopped sweeping and stood stone silent. I could make out her figure, but not her features, across the street in the city night dark. Her back was hunched the slightest bit. For a moment I thought she was going to speak to me normally. She said, “Motherfucking liar motherfucker gonna slit her throat.” She was looking up at my two-year-old’s window on the second floor. I think. I couldn’t tell if she’d said “her” or “your.”

  Either way.

  I called 911.

  It took a half hour for the cops to arrive. By the time they did, Rosie had been back in her house for most of the time. I told them about what happened. Their flashing lights lit windows up and down the block.

  “Did she actually threaten you?” the first cop asked. I told him that saying she was gonna slit a two-year-old’s throat seemed like a threat to me. The second cop went over and knocked on Rosie’s door. Knocking on her door this late into the dark made it feel doubly intrusive. We stood there watching him on her front porch. She didn’t open. He came back over.

  “If we heard her say it ourselves, maybe we could do something. But honestly, sir, what can we do?”

  “You could 302 her, right?”

  “I’m sure as hell not gonna do that,” the second cop said. “Once the 302 is called in, we have to forcibly remove her from the premises,” he said. “You can’t call it off. Break down the door, hog-tie, chase her down in the streets, whatever it takes.”

  I told them thank you and as my wife had advised me I asked them for their names and badge numbers and an incident report. Once their car was clear of our block I heard Rosie inside her front window say, “Motherfucker MRI liar gonna slit all your throats.”


  Just as I was about to go into the house Mikey Jr. came walking up. He was almost always out at night smoking a cigarette.

  “More trouble with Rosie,” he said. I told him what had been going on. “I knew her in high school,” he said. “She was a little weird, but not like this. Her brother was Crazy Joey. Same shit. Her mother lives over in Kensington. Owns the house but they don’t come by more than once every couple months. If you can catch her she’ll talk to you.” I said thanks. “I might even be able to get a phone number.”

  That night I told Jen everything. She asked if I wanted to just go ahead and 302 her myself if I’d gotten so involved. She’d explained to me all that entailed and I surprised myself with my own response.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” I said. “Have her become my responsibility. Go to a 302 court. Show up every time they call. I have my own responsibilities! We have two kids. I work forty hours a week, have this house to take care of, have neighbors we actually like to invite to dinners, have the—” She told me she knew, she knew, she knew. It was what she might have said, but she didn’t. I did. I didn’t want to get any more involved.

  And yet.

  This is probably the part of the story where you’re expecting me to say that by July Rosie had gotten so bad we had no other choice. Or worse. That we woke up in the middle of the night to find Isabella shaking uncontrollably, holding her bloodied kid and yelling like Medea, skyward to the gods, for mercy. I’m not going to trump this up or make it into anything other than the subtle confusion it was, start to end. I called the cops many times over the next month. So did Isabella, so did Jim, so did Michele. But no one was ready to be the one to 302 her.

  Beyond that we had a summer. The kids went to day camp, day care. We found a way to fill their time. One Saturday afternoon we took them down to Center City. Our older daughter is eight, old enough to get a sense of history. We parked in one of the pay lots on South Second and walked to the Constitution Center, then up Elfreth’s Alley, the oldest residential block in the US. People have been neighbors to each other there, day and night, since fifty years before the Declaration was signed. We peered in windows like we were looking into a museum but people peered back—we were looking into their homes, not quite the neighborly thing to do. Jen and I looked at each other and walked the kids on.