We Others

1

We others are not like you. We are more prickly, more jittery, more restless, more reckless, more secretive, more desperate, more cowardly, more bold. We live at the edges of ourselves, not in the middle places. We leave that to you. Did I say: more watchful? That above all. We watch you, we follow you, we spy on you, we obsess over you. We crave your attention. We hunger for a sign. We humiliate ourselves—always. Hence our scorn, our famous bitterness. But what’s all that to you?

My name, if I still have a name, is Paul Steinbach. I was born in Brooklyn Heights, in the middle of the last century. Of my childhood apartment on Joralemon Street I remember only a kitchen so narrow that I had to squeeze past my mother’s legs, a little balcony behind a high window that I was forbidden to open, and a mahogany oval table covered with puzzle pieces. I can still see my father sitting next to me on a rug, opening a squeaky black bag and drawing from it, very slowly, a long snaky thing with a silver circle at one end. He raises the object solemnly toward my face, fastens something to each of my ears, and presses the cold circle against my chest. “Listen,” he says gravely. “That is the sound of your life.”

Shortly after my fourth birthday we rode in a train away from Brooklyn and never came back. Our new home was in a small town in southern Connecticut, where my bedroom looked down on a backyard with a clothes pole and two crab-apple trees. My father, who worked from an office in our house, struggled at first but gradually established a successful practice, represented in my mind, even then, by our move across town to a tree-shaded house with two porches: an open front porch with wicker chairs and a glider, and a screened back porch with the Brooklyn couch and my grandmother’s armchair with lace doilies. I was a happy child, well liked by my friends, adored by my mother, and encouraged by my father in all my pursuits. My favorite pastimes were collecting minerals, building model ships with masts and rigging, and taking photographs with my own twin-lens reflex that hung on a strap around my neck. I want to emphasize that from the beginning I was a normal, ordinary, well-adjusted boy, without a trace of anything that might account for the fate that lay in store for me. In eighth grade I joined the Science Club and had a crush on Diana Aprilliano. In high school I joined the swim team, learned to ice-skate, and kissed Margaret Mason on the mouth at a Halloween party. In college two things happened to me: I fell in love with a girl I had known in high school, and after a brief flirtation with English literature I switched to pre-med.

With the help of a scholarship and a federal loan I went on to medical school in Boston. Let me be clear: I did not have strange ideas. I did not spend my time brooding over the mysteries of the universe. After a three-year residency I started my own practice, paid off the loan, and married the girl from high school. A year later I put a down payment on a house in our town, not far from the old neighborhood. We were happy for a time, then less happy. There was a miscarriage; after the second one we were told it would be dangerous to try again. She became moody, withdrawn; the joy of life seemed to go out of her. I could feel her floating away, like a balloon on a string that slips through fingers trying to hold on. One day she left to spend a few weeks with her parents in Florida and never returned. After a period of unhappiness I came to understand that it had to be this way. I was able to throw myself into my work and soon became active in community affairs. I even came close to marrying a second time, but something felt wrong, I pulled back at the last moment. Over the next years my practice continued to grow. My friendships remained strong. My health was excellent. Not long after my forty-sixth birthday my father had a triple bypass that left him weak and barely able to walk; he died from a second heart attack six months later. My mother did not survive the year. I sold the family house, consulted a financial advisor, and invested the money in a portfolio of mutual funds and treasury bonds that earned a steady seven and a half percent. At no time did my thoughts take a peculiar turn. My nature was practical. I moved my office to North Main Street and the following summer delivered a series of well-received talks on medicine and morality to the Ethical Culture Society. In this and all other activities I concentrated on the here and now. The riddle of the universe was of less concern to me than the prevention of a flu. I was invited to picnics and dinner parties, widened my circle of friends, and served on the Board of Health and the Regional Planning Commission. At the age of fifty-two I felt almost like a young man. My outlook was hopeful, my income excellent. I began to entertain the idea of marriage again. One evening toward the middle of September I experienced a slight episode of dizziness. I went to bed with a feeling of uneasiness and a heaviness on my chest. I immediately took out my stethoscope and listened to my heart and lungs. As I did so I recalled my father pressing the cold circle against my chest and saying: “That is the sound of your life.” I vowed to stop working so hard, to take some time off; I hadn’t had a vacation in a long time. I soon fell into a restless half sleep.

I woke in the early dawn with a pleasant sense of lightness, as if the weight had lifted not only from my chest but from my entire body. At the same time there was an odd kind of airiness in my mind that I had never experienced before. It wasn’t a dizziness but a bizarre sort of clarity, as if I were able to perceive objects with unusual distinctness, while at the same time I felt sharply separate from them. I saw the lamp on the night table, the digital clock, myself in the bed. It struck me as strange that I should be able to see myself in the bed, and I wondered whether I was suffering from a disorder of the visual system. I was in the bed and I was outside the bed, watching myself in the bed. The figure in the bed did not move. I bent over and saw that I was no longer breathing. I remember seeing the tendon of my neck protruding, my hand rigid on the spread. On the night table my eyeglasses lay folded on a mystery novel with a cover showing a black gun and a blood-red rose. I thought: Now there is no one to return my book to the library. At that moment an understanding began to grow in me, like a ripple of terror, though even then I couldn’t have said what it was that had happened in that room.

2

Let me linger over that moment. A sensation is growing within me—a sensation that I’m about to understand something. I pose a hypothesis: I, Paul Steinbach, am suffering from a form of mental derangement that causes me to experience myself as two beings. My very ability to form this hypothesis makes me doubt its validity. I feel that it is extremely important for me to trust my senses, even though they may be misleading me. My senses inform me that I am observing my lifeless body on the bed. But who is this observer? I consult my memory. I see the oval table in Brooklyn, with its scattering of puzzle pieces. I see the screened back porch in Connecticut, the sunlight streaming through the venetian blinds in my boyhood room that looked down on the crab-apple trees. There can be no doubt at all that I am Paul Steinbach. Yet there he lies, Paul Steinbach, in his bed. I can see the familiar hand lying on the bedspread. The nail of the fourth finger needs to be cut. He is not breathing. I try to observe what I can of my other self, the one who’s standing beside the bed, and I see a vagueness, a sort of ripple or waver. At this instant my understanding takes a leap forward, and without exactly knowing what it is I’m doing, I burst into a laugh.

That is what we do, we others: we burst into a laugh. It is the brash, uneasy laugh of one who is about to understand. There is another laugh that we reserve for the moment of understanding itself.

I fled. There was no reason to remain. I was about to understand, but I didn’t want to understand. I wanted only to be elsewhere. How familiar I was to become with that desire!—the desire to be elsewhere. It is our nature. That, and the desire to hover, to remain.

I fled downstairs and out into the backyard. All my senses, such as they were, warned me to keep out of sight. The sky was a darkish luminous gray, the exact color of a smoky quartz crystal. A band of pallor showed in the east. At any moment the sun would leap up with a shout. I made my way through the tall hedge and entered the Delvecchio backyard, with its flagstone patio shaded by a canvas top. On the black-green grass a soccer ball sat beside a yellow sprinkler, silent in the dark dawn-light. Through hedges and fences I passed from yard to yard, under cover of a day not yet begun. Now and then I would hear a voice from a radio, the clatter of a dish. A length of downspout lay in the grass by a cellar window. I crossed Myrtle Street, disappeared between two sleeping houses, hurried from yard to yard as if I were being pursued. Once a cat on a porch arched its back and hissed at me as I passed. I fled across other streets, made my way into little-known neighborhoods. Here and there I saw a sudden figure standing in a kitchen window. In the east, the whitish band was turning pale blue. I soon found myself in an older part of town. Mailboxes with red reflectors that looked like gigantic lollipops sat at the ends of driveways. Here the houses were set deep among pines and oaks. I crept along the side of a garage, crossed a back lawn, slipped through a stand of spruce, and entered a backyard where a wooden swing hung down from the branch of an old sugar maple.

It was dark under the leaves. A coil of hose hung from a hook beside a porch with a sloping roof. A shovel leaned up against the railing. Night reigned in the dark yard, though day was breaking out above.

I climbed onto the porch and entered through the screen door, the wooden door. In the kitchen a single cup and a single dish sat in the dish rack. The living room and dining room were empty. The stairs were covered with a faded carpet. In the upstairs hall I found what I was looking for: a door that opened onto a flight of wooden steps. At the top of that stairway I stopped. I looked at the dark rafters, at the old bookcases filled with glassware and toys, at the dressmaker’s dummy beside the sewing machine, and in the dark and permanent dusk I felt, for the first time that day, that I might be able to rest awhile.

3

For three days I remained in that attic, as if I’d been flung into prison. At some point during the second day I burst into another laugh: the short, bitter laugh of one who knows. Otherwise I was silent as a fog. When light streamed through the small window, I sought the dark corners; at night I prowled restlessly. An attic is the most seductive portion of any house, combining as it does the aura of the department store, the museum, and the ruined city, and I began to make myself familiar with its collection of objects. Here and there rose chest-high piles of brown packing boxes, each with its neat label printed in black marker: SWEATERS, BLOUSES, PLACE MATS, MITTENS AND GLOVES, GIRL SCOUT UNIFORM: 5TH GRADE. On a tilted wooden coatrack hung a broad-brimmed straw hat with pink plastic flowers, a knitted red scarf with white reindeer, and an extension cord. Beside an old carpet sweeper stood a twelve-room dollhouse with curtains on all the windows; four little dolls were seated at a table, leaning sideways in their chairs, as if they’d been shot. I saw bears, giraffes, elephants, an old black typewriter in a sewing basket, a tall porcelain vase that held a shiny metal tube from an old vacuum cleaner. At some point on the first day I heard a car pull up to the garage in back, a key turn in a downstairs lock. Footsteps struck the floor—a single pair of footsteps, as the one cup and saucer had led me to hope. Later that day I heard her voice on the telephone. It was a low voice, without much inflection. I could not make out the words. I became familiar with her sounds: the rush of water from the kitchen faucet, the whistle of a teapot, the knock of a spoon against a cup. She left by the back door in the early morning and returned in the afternoon, before other cars returned. From the attic window at the rear of the house I could see her car, a small silver hatchback, backing out of the garage in the morning and driving up in the afternoon.

I came downstairs on the fourth night. For when all is said and done, we are curious, we others, we simply cannot help ourselves. At the bottom of the carpeted stairway I saw her sitting on the couch in the darkened living room. She was watching television. A light in the kitchen had been left on; through the half-open door a glow came partway into the dark room. She was a stout mid-fortyish woman, with big pink eyeglasses and a small girlish mouth. Her hair lay in straight bangs across her broad forehead and fell to her shoulders. She was wearing some sort of flowered housedress with short sleeves. When she moved, a barrette gleamed above her ear. She looked like a little girl who had become a big matronly woman without ceasing to be a little girl. I stood watching her until she turned her head with a slight frown, as if she’d become aware of something in the room.

4

I began to come down nightly, during her television time. I wanted to observe her, I wanted to be near her, I wanted—oh, who knows what we want, as we stand there watching you and trying to make up our minds! There she sat, intently watching a crime drama or an office comedy while she sipped cup after cup of herb tea and nibbled on salted almonds in a dish. At first I was careful to stay at the bottom of the stairway and peer into the darkened room. Against the wall directly on my left stood a CD player on a table. Then came a shadowy bookcase. The couch sat with its back to the bookcase, leaving a passageway.

After the first few nights I began to think about that passageway. Beyond the bookcase, in a dark corner near the half-open kitchen door, stood a lamp table and an armchair. It seemed to me that someone who was cautious but also deeply curious by nature could walk behind the couch in the direction of that armchair without attracting the attention of a person absorbed in a thrilling courtroom battle involving a beautiful defense lawyer and a corrupt judge. One night it happened. I walked along the passageway and sat down in the dark armchair. It was as simple as that. I was now closer to her and able to observe more of her: the other side of her head with its exposed ear, a moccasin sitting on a far cushion, her big pale knees. Had she turned her head, she might have seen him there—the stranger in the dark, waiting like a killer in a B movie. Did I want her to see me? Yes and no. After all, our condition is desperate. Ours is a savage loneliness of which you can know nothing. At the same time we are proud, haughty, unwilling to be known. For the moment it was enough to be in her presence.

Meanwhile I was getting to know quite a bit about her. Her name was Maureen, as I learned from the voice of someone on the phone. She taught second grade at the Collins Street Elementary School. She arrived home each weekday in the mid- or late afternoon, sometimes carrying small packages of groceries, as I could see from the attic window. She immediately climbed the carpeted stairs to her room on the second floor, where she changed out of her teaching clothes (scrape of hangers, bang of drawers) into her house clothes, which at night I saw to be either loose smocks printed with flowers, or oversized button-down shirts that hung down over baggy corduroys. Each night, at exactly eight by the mantelpiece clock—a white porcelain kitten—she called her mother and spoke to her while watching TV with the sound off. During these conversations she became tense and would rub her knuckles across her forehead or scratch her palm again and again with the curled fingers of the same hand. When she was through talking she would stride into the kitchen and return with a dish of malted-milk balls, which she devoured swiftly, as if angrily. The skin of her hands and face was very smooth, her nails short and polished. She fiddled a great deal with her eyeglasses, often removing them, holding them up toward the light from the kitchen, and returning them to her face.

It is not pleasant to observe someone secretly. For me at least there was in it no sense of exhilarating power, of mental or sensual freedom, as there might have been if I were a man of perverted appetites feeding on the sight of a seductive woman observed without her knowledge. What was it that I wanted, in that dark living room, in that lonely house, at the far end of town? To call it a desire for companionship would be to confuse it with more respectable realms of feeling. Our desire is infused with a darker, more ferocious longing: the desire for all that we have ceased to be.

I can’t say when exactly Maureen became aware of my presence. At first there were small signs—a sudden tension in her neck, an abrupt slight shifting of her head, a pause in the movement of her hand, as if she were listening. I should explain that she was somewhat nervous in temperament, and it wasn’t always easy to distinguish the new signs from her usual habits. Every evening she would get up to check the chain on the front door; she was always turning her head at the sound of a passing car. Sometimes she went to the kitchen, raised the shade, and peered out at the backyard. Once she called the police to report that someone was out there, behind the sugar maple—she’d seen something, she was sure of it. Every once in a while she sat up abruptly, rummaged wildly through her purse, and pulled out her cell phone, which was not ringing.

Now, it is my belief that these nervous natures, perpetually distracted by small disturbances in the outside world, are precisely the ones who prove unusually receptive to our kind. I began to sense a new alertness in her as I entered the room. Her body would become very still, her head would tilt slightly, her fingers stiffen, as if someone had crept up behind her and placed a hand gently on her shoulder. Once settled in my chair, beside the always unlit lamp, I would see her look around, very slowly. Sometimes she would stretch her arm across the back of the couch, place her chin on her forearm, and survey the part of the room behind her: the CD player, the bookcase, the lamp table and armchair in the dark corner.

One evening as I stepped from the bottom of the carpeted stairs and turned to enter the living room, I saw that something had changed. She was sitting on the couch, as always, but the television wasn’t on. The remote lay on the coffee table beside the cup of tea. The room was dark, except for the light that entered through the half-open kitchen door. I sensed immediately that she was waiting—waiting for whatever it was that had begun to visit her. She sat motionless and alert, before the dead TV. I hesitated. Wouldn’t it be better to return to the attic, where I had made a home of sorts among the outcast objects of a life? Why risk the dangers of an unpredictable encounter? But we are curious, we others; we are driven by irresistible urges of a kind we ourselves can barely understand.

So for a long time I stood on that threshold, feeling both sides of an argument blowing through me like bitter winds, before I stepped into the room.

5

As I entered I reminded myself that she had become aware of something, over the last few days. Exactly what she’d become aware of I had yet to find out. At the very least she was aware that something wasn’t right in her house, and she had taken steps to meet it head on. It was a show of courage that I acknowledged with a certain gratitude. My sense of her was that she was a lonely woman, a woman who might welcome companionship—even such companionship as mine. I was less sure of my own reasons for crossing the threshold. I suppose I craved simply to be in her presence, as someone shivering with cold might wish to be in the presence of a fire. But it was more than that. I could feel in myself a stranger desire: the desire to be seen. It struck me that I hadn’t been looked at by anyone since the flight from my house, under the smoky-quartz sky, a trillion years ago.

The couch, as I’ve mentioned, stood in the middle of the room, where it faced the television. Beyond the couch, in the far corner, my armchair sat beside the lamp table with the unlit lamp. But there was a second armchair, a more sociable armchair, situated between the couch and the television, and facing neither. It was toward this chair that I now made my way, passing behind the couch and keeping my distance from the back of a head that suddenly struck me as a child’s prank—at any moment I’d see the mop handle standing straight up between the couch cushions, the mop head peeping over the couch-back. At the end of the couch I swung around and made my way over to the chair. There I stood stiffly, facing her profile, with one hand resting on the back of the chair, like a bank president in a portrait.

She began to turn her head—not precisely in my direction, but in the direction of the empty chair beside which I stood. The fact that she’d sensed my presence, but had mistaken my position, filled me with a kind of nervous irritation that felt like an inward itching, and without caring what anyone might think I abruptly stepped around and sat down. But she had already begun to look past the chair, first toward the half-open kitchen door, and then toward a corner of the room that held a small table with a glass bowl on top. This second gesture filled me with such hopelessness that I had to turn my face away. At that moment I felt penetrated by the knowledge that this was how things were going to be from now on, this sensation of absence and emptiness, and that it would be far better for me to stop all the nonsense and return to my attic, where I would live like a spider or a bat. When I raised my head I saw that she was staring directly at me. One hand was pressed flat against the couch cushion and the other was raised to a point just below her throat. She looked like a woman who was protecting herself from a cold wind. I waited for her to leap up, to knock over the coffee table and send the cup of tea rushing across the rug, to stumble wildly from the room, but what happened next wasn’t at all what I might have expected. Stricken with a sensation of awkwardness, of sorrow, and of terrible shame, I rose slowly from the chair, looked once in her direction, and made my way out of the room. During my retreat she remained sitting on the couch with one hand pressed to the cushion and one hand resting below her throat.

6

I remained shut up in the attic all the next day. During the whole of that time I paced fiercely—we know how to pace fiercely!—flinging myself down in corners, leaping up, moving about, collapsing onto a metal-trimmed trunk or a box of dolls. I was so furious at myself for my cowardly flight that I wanted to dissolve into ribbons of smoke. At the same time I kept summoning to mind the unfortunate moment in which I’d been seen. She had looked at me the way a woman in an alley at midnight might look at a man with a rag around his head who is holding a knife. It is not good to be looked at in that way. It’s especially not good if one has come down from the attic in search of—in search of what? Shall we say, a pleasant encounter between two like-minded souls, in a suburban living room, of a September eve? And yet the craving to reveal ourselves spreads in us like a disease. It’s also true that we long not to be seen, never to be seen, to live out our existence—our existence!—like growths of mold in the depths of forests.

At night I couldn’t bear it anymore. I came down, but only to glance into the living room before escaping from the house. She was sitting there in the dark, waiting for me. She was waiting patiently—waiting tenaciously. I could feel that waiting like a distant storm. Outside, in the night, I felt a sudden sense of expansion, as when, as a child, after passing along the stream under the road by the side of the bakery, I came out onto a sunny field. Was it possible that I hadn’t been outside in all this time? I turned defiantly from the almost dark house and strode out into the night.

We are always striking poses, we others. It’s part of our unfortunate nature.

And yet I was happy enough, on my night journey. It was one of those summery nights in September when the sky seems to be the dark blue ceiling of an immense theater, which I had been allowed to enter even though it was long past closing time. Someone with a big pair of scissors had cut the moon exactly in half. I drifted from yard to yard with a sense of discovering new powers of movement. For though it’s far from true that there are no barriers to our kind, nevertheless we range with a freedom that, under happier circumstances, might fill us with delirious joy. I made my way through hedges and fences with dreamlike ease, accompanied by inner ripples or flutters that felt like the very sensation of transgression. Now and then I strayed onto dark back porches, where I stretched myself out on a chaise longue or sat on a motionless glider before passing on.

Such pleasures quickly pall. I struck out beyond the world of backyards and soon found myself looking up at the stone pillars and tall windows of my old high school. Inside, I roamed along rows of olive-green lockers, drifted up the stairs, entered a classroom that I suddenly recognized as my English class of thirty-five years ago, though the desks had changed and something about the blackboards was all wrong. I had sat two rows over from Margaret Mason. I remembered the heavy sweaters she wore, dark green and brown-gold. From the high windows at the side of the room I looked down at the athletic field and the distant railroad tracks. I remembered the way she would push up the sleeves of those sweaters to reveal her long forearms. But already I felt a sharp impatience. What was I doing here, creeping around like a pale criminal in the teenage museum? Back in the corridor I found another staircase and headed down. As I turned into the first-floor corridor I became aware of a motion at the far end, as of a stirred curtain. With a feeling of revulsion, almost of outrage, I understood that I was looking at another of my kind.

Until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me that I wasn’t the only one. I had been feeling my way into the conditions of my new existence, brooding over my nocturnal visits to Maureen, accustoming myself to myself, in a manner of speaking—it had taken what energy I possessed simply to pass through the motions of my day. Now, all at once, I had the sense of stepping outside the narrow circle of my obsessions, into a wider realm. At the same time, as I’ve said, the feeling that seized me in the presence of my fellow outcast was not pleasant. Does the fat boy in gym class love the other fat boy in gym class? No, I kept my distance. It’s that way with all of us. In time we tame it down, that quiver of revulsion, but it is always there.

What came over me now was a violent desire I didn’t entirely understand: I longed to be back in the living room. Was it that, in the presence of my own kind, I longed all the more for what I could no longer be? The night journey had lost its power. I remember nothing of the way back.

She was still sitting there, like a marble monument in a park. I was aware of something awkward about her position and soon realized that she must have fallen asleep. She was leaning toward the far end of the couch, with her arm stretched along the couch-back and her head bent into her forearm. A pity came over me for this big girl-woman who had fallen asleep waiting for something—waiting for me—and I felt a momentary impulse to reach out my hand. It is not our way. It’s never our way. I sat down at the other end of the couch and observed her closely. The pressure of her cheek against her arm pulled up one side of her mouth, so that she appeared to be snarling. Her free hand lay palm up in her lap, with the fingers open and slightly curled, as if she were holding an invisible tangerine.

For a long time I watched her as she slept—watched over her, I couldn’t help thinking. I imagined that at any moment she would sleepily open her eyes. She would find me there—her protector, her brother. But we are sentimentalists, we others. She was dead asleep.

When at last I stood up to return to the attic, an awkwardness came over me as I loomed above her while she lay twisted against the couch in sleep; and suddenly, dramatically, extravagantly, absurdly, I bowed.

7

I thought about that bow the following night as I paced the attic wondering what to do. For though we’d established a rapport of sorts, I was reluctant to inflict on myself a repetition of our first meeting. Humiliation still flamed in me; to avoid another occasion for it seemed a kind of victory. Victory? For us there is no victory. For us there is only the sharper or duller savor of failure. We are the lords of desolation. We leave the triumphs to you.

Besides, darkness is our natural element, as Maureen herself had cleverly come to understand. Light harms us, like a shout in the ear. Instinctively we avoid the glare over the kitchen sink, the clock radio with its violent green numerals, the ominous night-light howling in its socket. We prefer the quiet place where the rafters slope down to the floorboards. In earlier times, before the fanatical multiplication of light, we were no doubt more present in the darkness of the world, more visible, more familiar, more woven into the fabric of things. I was pursuing this line of thought when I was startled by a flare of light that immediately went out.

She had opened the door to the attic—what I’d seen was the light from the hall—and immediately closed it. She was climbing the stairs in the dark. Maureen never entered the attic. That she had done so, and in the dark, was alarming and revelatory: she must have come in search of me. I was fortunately far away from the head of the stairs, well hidden behind a wicker hamper beside an old couch on which sat an enormous bear. Any movement might reveal me. At the top of the stairs she stopped. She stood there a long while—I could hear her breathing as if she’d run around the block. She took a step forward and stopped again. She stood motionless for a full five minutes before turning and descending the stairs.

I understood that I was in some sense to blame for having provoked this attic journey—that she was bound to search the house for a presence she felt had taken up residence. I understood another thing as well: it was in my interest to confront her on her own ground.

I listened for her footsteps in the living room before making my way down. She was sitting in the dark like a queen of the netherworld. This time I entered decisively, and as I did so I thought how rarely I had acted with decision since the moment I had entered this house. We are not decisive, we others. Or rather, our decisiveness is intermittent and erratic, with intervals of paralysis, so that what it most resembles is its opposite. Then I recalled that other life, where I hurled myself through obstacles with energy and certainty. But already I had crossed the room in front of her and was sitting down in the armchair that faced neither the couch nor the television.

I could sense the change in her, though she remained as motionless as the cushion she sat on. It was a sudden tension of alertness—a tightening that was also a readiness. All her senses had sprung open. I could see her face in the darkness, looking more or less at me but not precisely. Her eyes moved, as if trying to find someone there.

“What do you want?” she then asked.

I hadn’t expected her to speak. In her voice I heard coldness, and anger—the anger of a woman whose privacy has been violated. I heard also a touch of curiosity. And there was something else I heard, something that seemed to me a kind of wary and distrustful hope. It was the hope of someone whose desperately dull life has at last taken a turn toward the unexpected—toward the unknown.

We do not like to speak, we others. We inhabit silence as we inhabit darkness—naturally. Even among ourselves, what takes place is a species of silent speech—but more of that later. At the moment I felt a dreary need to answer her.

“What I want,” I said, and stopped. It was the first time I’d heard myself speak. I heard what sounded like a voice at a great distance—a faint, thin, rippling voice, a voice blown by a wind.

“What I want,” I said again. “What I want—” The sound of those wavering words rang out in me like a cry. I felt a violence of wanting, a rage of bitter longing. The force of it frightened me, as if I had leaped out at myself in the dark.

“It’s all right,” she then said. “Everything’s going to be all right.” And I was grateful to her for those words, for she had felt my trouble; and I was angry at her for those words, for nothing was ever going to be all right.

8

She allowed me to sit there in silence—it seemed enough for her that I’d come at all. Nor did she object when I rose not long after to take my leave, though the look she threw at me seemed to say that I would find her there tomorrow, at exactly the same time. And so I visited her the next night, and the night after; it quickly became a habit. She would prepare carefully for these encounters. After dinner she changed clothes a second time—clash of hangers, thud of drawers—and sometimes there were long pauses, in which I imagined her studying herself before a mirror, or combing her hair with scrunched-up eyes. Back in the living room she would close the venetian blinds and take up her position on the couch, with her cup of tea and a book. Sometimes I heard a faint whirring or grinding sound: she was sharpening a pencil in the electric sharpener as she prepared a lesson plan or corrected a set of second-grade exercises. At eight o’clock she called her mother. After that came the malted-milk balls. I would hear low sounds from the television, and sometimes I could make out the clicks of turned-off lamps. Later in the evening I might hear a faint rattling sound: salted almonds spilling into a dish. At some point I heard her moving about the living room, drawing the long curtains across the windows. In the kitchen she turned off the overhead light, leaving only the fluorescent light above the kitchen sink. Only then was she ready for me. In the not-quite-dark darkness she would take up her position on the couch, drawing her legs under her, smoothing down her dress or fiddling with the knees of her pants, turning off the TV with the remote, and subsiding into stillness.

It was about this time that I would come down, for I too had been waiting. I would make my way over to the armchair and our evening would begin.

Maureen understood that I preferred not to speak, but she herself had a good deal to say. She spoke of her childhood in a small town in northern Vermont—she had read a lot, worn eyeglasses, and felt that her older, prettier, thinner sister was the one her mother really cared about. No boy ever gave her the time of day until senior year of high school, when Ron Olsen invited her to a party and left with another girl. She went to college at the University of Vermont and after graduation began teaching in elementary school in her hometown. At her school she fell in love with an older man, married him, and divorced him a year later when she learned he was carrying on with another teacher. She moved first to upstate New York, where she felt out of place, and then to Connecticut, where she’d been teaching for over twenty years. It was difficult for a single woman, the social life here was closed, her mother was always hounding her. She saw her sister once a year, at Thanksgiving, though she was close to Andrea, the older of her two nieces. Andrea was like a daughter to her, and visited her more than she visited her own mother—not that that came as a big surprise.

I listened with wavering attention to these revelations, wondering precisely what it was that I was doing there. It was true enough that I liked being spoken to—it hardly mattered what was said. Sometimes she would seize my attention by a sudden swerve in my direction. “I can’t always see you,” she might say, “but I always know you’re here.” Evidently we moved in and out of visibility, in accordance with laws that we ourselves have never understood. “Do you see me now?” I once said, in that quavering voice—for I sometimes broke into speech. “Oh yes,” she replied. “I can see you real well. You’ve got your hair parted on one side—eyeglasses—strong chin—a distinguished-looking man. You’re wearing a sport jacket—herringbone, I think—open—no tie. Your fingers are long.” At other times she could make out my eyeglasses and my general form but without any detail. These are the things that obsess our kind. We cannot be told enough about ourselves.

I understood that what drew me to Maureen wasn’t quite the same as what drew her to me. Though she was careful not to ask questions, I knew she was deeply curious about my history—she wanted to know me so that she could absorb me into her life. At times she behaved like someone who was engaged in the act of being courted. For me she was—well: one of you. I don’t mean that I was indifferent to her. Not at all. There was a sweetness about her, a flirtatious innocence, that I knew how to appreciate. But I was what I was, and she?—she was everything I had left behind. We are drawn to you, we others, because you carry with you all that we no longer are. We are jealous. We’re angry. We are filled with unbearable longing. It is not good for you to be with us. Maureen knew nothing of this. I could feel her terrible happiness.

Thus our evenings. After a longer or shorter while I would take my leave, silently. Her visible regret was appeased by the knowledge that I would return the next night. I could feel her anticipation opening in her like a wound. For my part, I was already restless. Back in the attic, I waited for her to creak into bed before making my way down the two flights of stairs and out into the night.

9

The pleasures of the night! I call them pleasures, those wistful wanderings, with their intimations of freedom, their little whiffs of forgetfulness, but really there should be another word. For me the night was a larger attic, in which my restlessness might more readily seek distraction. The dark was never dark enough. I avoided the streetlights that glared down at me even in rural lanes, the store lights in town, the warm-lit front windows. I was a wanderer in the forlorn byways of the night, a seeker-out of extinguished places. I welcomed the tilted headstones of unlit churchyards, the clusters of pines and picnic tables behind shutdown ice-cream parlors. There is a poetry of abandoned public places, and I became a connoisseur of the deserts of the night: the three dumpsters at the side of the car-wash, the piles of wooden pallets in the delivery lot behind the supermarket, the row of empty swings hanging from chains beside the slide in the forsaken playground. I was the companion of lawnmowers in toolsheds, of gas grills beside tarp-covered woodpiles. In the backyards of the night, rabbits sat like stone sculptures, then darted like leaping ballerinas across dark lawns. Raccoons peered out at me from behind fat garbage cans.

Let me confess it: I wasn’t out only for poetry. The incident at the high school was with me still. Now and then I would come across one of them—a shadowy wanderer, a fellow seeker of abandoned places. We would acknowledge each other uneasily, abruptly, as our kind do, and pass into our separate solitudes. One night as I was returning home I entered a backyard and was startled to see two figures standing on opposite sides of the lawn. I say “see,” but that isn’t precisely the way we perceive our own kind. It’s first of all an almost tactile sensation, as if one should enter a black room and know that someone else is there. You must understand that these are rough approximations at best, since there can be no question of the tactile with respect to us. Second, there is an immediate and absolute perception—perhaps that word will do—of the other, which includes a knowledge of physical appearance. The distinction from seeing lies in our knowledge of certain aspects of appearance that cannot be gained from immediate sight—the back of the head, for instance, or the shape of a hand hidden in a pocket. It’s as if, in the moment of perception, we experience the entirety of the other being, without the limitation of perspective that is characteristic of sight. So it is with us. I don’t know why it should be so, only that it is so.

Two figures, then: one a man of about sixty, standing by the side of the garage in a rumpled suit, with the front part of his tie hanging out of his buttoned suit-jacket; the other a woman of perhaps thirty, in a blouse and knee-length skirt, with hair pulled tightly back, standing very erect under a tulip tree. They didn’t seem surprised that I should have entered the yard. I stood by a corner of the hedge, well apart from both of them. There was nothing unusually awkward in this dismal meeting; I understood that they, that we, were waiting to enter the house.

Soon a figure emerged from the back door and stood on the porch. It was our sign to enter. He led us through the deserted house up to the attic. It was a much larger attic than mine, well cluttered, with high rafters and a series of subdivisions that formed smaller alcoves. It was the first time I had seen so many of our kind. Disposed on barrels and trunks, on broken chairs and old couches, here standing erect, there sitting on the bare floorboards, they filled the attic like an expectant audience at a theater. Indeed it was clear to me that we were all waiting for something to begin. Several new figures entered and made their way over to empty spaces. We are of course capable of occupying the same space, we others, but the idea is inexpressibly repellent to us. The slightest accident of that kind—an arm brushing through an arm—creates in us a sensation of nausea.

A figure of about forty, wearing a pullover and jeans, stepped onto a wooden box and addressed the group. But again I am giving a misleading impression. Among ourselves we never speak, we others. Our thoughts are projected, or emitted, silently and are immediately apprehended. It isn’t a matter of having one’s darkest secrets available to others; the thought, once formed into words, must be willed outward. This is the silent speech we use among ourselves.

The subject of the gathering was the nature of our being. Last week, he said, we had discussed whether or not we may be said to exist at all, and, if so, what the nature of that existence might be said to be. The discussion had ended inconclusively. This evening we were going to approach the issue obliquely, by considering one of the questions concerning our capacities or abilities in the world in which we find ourselves: namely, our relation to material objects. If, he said, as the evidence suggests, we are insubstantial beings, how is it that we are able to assume certain relations to objects—as, for example, a chair in which we have the power to sit? It is well known that we can pass through those very objects with which we can assume relations that appear to be substantial. It’s also well known that we can rest for long periods in a manner bearing no relation to the material world. What then is our nature? What are our powers? Can we, as some have claimed, cause a material object to move? He had never witnessed it, himself, though he was open to persuasion. It seemed to him—and he’d thought about such matters for a long, long time—that although we were strictly insubstantial beings, we were, under certain circumstances, able to move in the direction of substantiality, or, more precisely, to adapt ourselves to the material conditions in which we found ourselves. Exactly how this came about was uncertain. More often than not, in his experience, it concerned the presence of them, in whose houses we took up residence.

I won’t report here all that he had to say, or the discussion that followed. Suffice to say that I found myself drawn deeply into his words, which seemed to strike at the center of what I was. The gathering lasted far into the night before breaking up rather abruptly. I learned that gatherings were held once a week, in the attics of houses known to be empty for the night. For although we avoid others of our kind, we are also compelled toward one another by some inner command, which is perhaps no more than the desire of the freak to lift the flap of the sideshow tent.

Outside, the night had already lost its charm. I returned to my attic, from whose window a streak of dawn was already visible. As I settled into unrestful rest, wondering whether I was assuming a relation to the floorboards that might be called substantial, I could already hear the sound of Maureen moving from her bed to her closet, where she would throw on her robe before descending the stairs to the kitchen.

10

Let me pass briskly over the next three weeks. Things happen that way: an hour expands into centuries, three weeks collapse into the space of a sentence. My existence, to call it that, had begun to settle into a shape. At half-past nine by the mantelpiece kitten-clock I entered the darkened living room and sat with Maureen for an hour and a half. Afterward I withdrew to the attic, where I waited impatiently for the sounds of her bedtime routine. Then it was off into the night with me, as I sought out abandoned places and tried to come to grips with the unthinkable nature of my unspeakable existence—then up and away, as I fled that understanding and returned to the darkness at the top of the house before the first gray began to glimmer through the dusty attic window. Meanwhile I attended each weekly gathering as if I were a responsible member of a citizens’ association concerned with neighborhood safety. Orderly in my habits, bourgeois even in my disarray, I could feel myself settling into my new unlife.

Not that the world was changeless around me. Fall was upon us, the trees—but what has that to do with the likes of us? We don’t shiver, we don’t require scarves and overcoats—those are for you. Nor does our melancholy have need of autumnal decors. Autumn, then: a fact, no more. What was changing was Maureen. Her waiting had become more charged with anticipation—I could feel it in the atmosphere. I could see it as well, for she now had a habit of changing into more elaborate clothes. One night I found her in a flouncy black dress that swooped down to her ankles, with a lavender shawl flung around her shoulders and big-loop earrings dangling like door knockers. Another night she wore a pleated mint-green skirt that came halfway down her thighs and a white V-neck sweater tucked into a wide red belt. Her hairstyles kept pace with her costumes: one night a frothy mass of curls, the next a tight updo with a French twist in back. Sometimes she talked in a rush, bursting into laughter and throwing her hands around; at others she sat silently and stared at me with an intensity that made me look away. Although she continued to honor my desire for silence, she began contriving ways to draw me into her talk. “I’m just going to ask you a question, and you just nod yes or no. Okay? Here goes. Do you find me a little—you know, attractive? I mean: this much?” Here she held up a hand, with the index finger one-half inch from the thumb. I wanted to tell her that, had we met at some other time, in some other universe—but what was the point? Her ardor made me restless. Did she really expect something of me? Was I supposed to take her out to dinner at the new bistro on South Main? I imagined the two of us sitting across from each other at a candle-lit corner table while people rose with their mouths open, their napkins falling, their wineglasses lying sideways on the red-stained white tablecloths. Even better: she would ask me to meet her mother. “Mother, this is Paul. Paul, say hello to Mother.” I was elaborating this picture when I became aware of a change in the atmosphere. The air had become denser and was pressing against me. I saw that she was leaning toward me, slowly reaching out a hand. It’s difficult for me to explain the sensation I then felt. It was a sensation of extreme alertness and above all of danger—as if something monstrous had entered the room.

I am not timid by nature and have never been afraid of the bodies of women. This fear was of a different kind—a warning that had flared up in every particle of my being. It wasn’t a physical fear. It was the fear of a child alone in the dark.

I stood up. I stepped back. I fled.

At that time I still had much to learn about the relations it is possible for us to have with your kind.

She understood; she didn’t attempt to touch me again. On her face, the next night, I saw only tiredness and gratitude—gratitude that I hadn’t taken flight forever. For my part, I wondered with irritation why I’d come back. My position toward her was becoming impossible. What was I doing there? What was I doing anywhere? Banished from her kind, distant from my own, I was nothing—nothing at all. Even that wasn’t true. If only it were! How I longed for the simplicity, the purity, of nothingness! Instead I was a something—a restlessness blown by a wind. I had sought her out for reasons still not clear to me, thereby awakening in her an absurd passion. I should have left that house, fled from that town, that solar system. But where was I to go? Besides, I was weak—we are all weak, we others. The weak are dangerous. Down with us.

During this time I hadn’t neglected the gatherings. They had about them a touch of the Quaker meeting and a touch of the secret society. It was still necessary for me to overcome an instinct of aversion, but nevertheless I found my way up to those attics and sought out the empty spaces. Some held forth inanely and at wearisome length; a few struck at the center of things. I paid attention whenever the figure in the pullover rose from wherever he was sitting. He spoke more than once of the phenomenon of what he called “presence”—the showing forth of one of our kind to one of yours. The precise conditions of its operation remained, he said, unknown to us. It was clear enough that in order for the phenomenon to take place, a receptive temperament was necessary, though what constituted receptivity was far less clear. Some of us believed that only certain human beings possessed the temperament that permitted presence to operate, while others argued that any temperament was receptive under favorable conditions, even if it remained uncertain what those favorable conditions might be. But it wasn’t only a question of the receiver. We too had a necessary part to play. We must, if he might put it that way, be receptive to being received. We must, in some sense, desire to be seen. It was true that there were cases in which we were seen unawares; such instances were uncommon, though not rare, and were not fully understood. There were also many cases in which the conditions appeared to be right, but presence was not achieved.

Such questions fascinate us, though they’re of no particular use. I knew at any rate that I had become entirely visible to Maureen, with whom I continued my nightly visits. She kept her distance, a little too pointedly, as if to assure me, reproachfully, that I was safe with her. I accepted the reproach and was grateful in my own way that she continued to receive me. One night I sensed that she was distressed about something. Her hands kept fluttering up to her face, where she would touch her eyeglasses or push back strands of hair. Had I upset her again? There was no mystery: she poured out her trouble. Her niece was coming to stay with her for a week—a whole week. She’d be arriving tomorrow. Andrea visited from time to time, and they got on really really well, but now was definitely not a good time, as I could surely understand. She and Andrea always sat up talking—but now she couldn’t bear the thought of sacrificing our evenings, since of course it was out of the question that Andrea should know anything about me. The only possible solution—she’d thought of many impossible ones—was for me to listen for Andrea’s return to the guest room, after which I would come down and visit. She would stay up late, as late as necessary, so that at least she didn’t feel she’d banished me—to say nothing about her own feelings of exile and the resentment she was bound to feel against Andrea, who to be fair was completely innocent and had problems of her own. She was the older of her sister’s two daughters, and from the beginning she’d been a disappointment to her mother—a plain-faced little girl, given to fits of sullenness, withdrawn even as a child, which wasn’t to say that she wasn’t a wonderful girl with a tender heart, but her mother saw only the outside of things—and you could imagine what happened when Sandra came along, Sandra with those big blue eyes and blond curls, happy, lovely, laughing Sandra, who looked like a cheerleader even at the age of four. Oh, but that was nasty; that was cruel; Sandra was all right, really; it was her mother who spoiled her rotten, bought the beautiful clothes that, on Andrea, always seemed a little out of place. It was only natural that Aunt Maureen should have shown an interest in poor little Andy, whom her mother was all too willing to allow to be taken off her hands. And so a bond had grown up between them, the childless auntie and the unhappy niece, each with a sister so popular that there had been nothing left for anyone else. She’d seen her niece through the throes, and brother did she mean throes, of adolescence, when Andrea had begun therapy, and she’d been there for her on Christmas holidays, when sexy Sandra and the boyfriend of the moment came rolling into town—and even now, at the age of twenty-six, holding down a decent job at the ad agency and paying her own rent, Andrea would drop in on her old Auntie Maur from time to time, especially when vacations loomed with their promise of empty days. So here she was—arriving tomorrow. There was no way out of it.

At this point in the narrative she paused to look at me.

I willed myself into the expulsion of a few words, in that thin and distant voice that put me in mind of a mournful wind. I heard my voice telling her that I would follow her plan, that things would be—all right. She was leaning forward, listening intently, as if my words were difficult to hear. Gradually the tension left her face, though she continued to look worried. She leaned back, closing her eyes.

“A week,” she said, and drew two fingers across her forehead. “Of course,” she said, “with a mother like that.” Her head slid slowly to one side, and I saw that she was asleep.

11

Andrea was for me a slower pair of footsteps, moving among the more energetic footsteps of her aunt. She spoke very quietly, with long silences and occasional coughs. All day she kept dragging her way up to her room on the second floor and dragging her way down again, as if she’d forgotten something but was in no hurry to find it. In her room, vague shufflings and pushings filled the silence. Later came the sounds of dinner, multiplied, interspersed with voices. The sounds moved into the living room: television, cups on saucers, low murmurs of talk. The night drew on. Slow footsteps climbed the stairs. Near the end of the hall stood a bathroom. Human beings turn a surprising number of doorknobs and faucet handles on the daily march to oblivion. The bed creaked. I went down.

“Do you think it’s safe?” Maureen whispered, leaning toward me and jerking her head toward the ceiling. Without waiting for an answer she told me that despite Andrea’s hard work, another girl had just been promoted to a position Andrea had every right to expect, it wasn’t fair the way things seemed to go against her, and on top of all that her landlord had said something rude to her, something inappropriate, Andrea hadn’t told her the exact words but it was the sort of thing that happened to women who lived alone, she’d have to look for another place, though that was easier said than done, what with rents being what they were, to say nothing of the expense and aggravation of moving, and of course Andrea didn’t make things any easier for herself by her attitude, which wasn’t hostile exactly but wasn’t what you’d call friendly either, though who could blame her after an upbringing like that, and it didn’t really help that she wouldn’t listen to a word of advice, all of which she tended to interpret as flat-out criticism, even well-meaning advice from her Auntie Maur, who only had her best interests at heart. But good heavens, listen to her! The last thing she wanted to do was bore me to death with family troubles, in the precious time we had together, though one thing she did feel she wanted to say about her niece was that Andrea could be a little, what was the best way to put it, a little on the self-absorbed side, which was understandable enough, what with her problems growing up in that family, but still, it wasn’t all that hard to imagine the needs of other people, who just might want a little time for themselves to unwind at the end of the day. Here Maureen took a deep breath and burst into tears. She immediately stopped herself and continued talking, as if her fit of weeping had been no more than a clearing of the throat.

As I listened to this rush of words, which came flying out of her like maddened bees, I contemplated my own relation to Maureen’s niece. My whole existence had been thrown into an uproar by the presence of this shuffling stranger in the house. I was irritated by the ease with which my composure could be shattered. We become used to things, we unhappy ones—we resent the slightest change. I think it’s because any modification of our precarious routine flings us up against ourselves, makes us glare at ourselves with a terrible clarity. At the same time we’re helplessly curious about newcomers, who, even as they oppress us with the weight of the unfamiliar, attract our unwilling attention. I was curious about Andrea as a dangerous phenomenon in the house, as I might be curious about a flooded cellar.

When our sitting time was over I went out into the night. Far from experiencing a sense of release from the confusion of the house, I felt only that the night was a larger form of disorder. Those wild-looking trees with their billions of branches, that wobbly moon like a child’s drawing … Back in the attic I could hear Andrea’s mattress creaking like an old floorboard. She was a restless sleeper. I imagined her continually reaching out for something that wasn’t there.

I heard her all the next day, moving slowly about the house while her aunt was at work. More than once she went up to her room and lay down. By the time Maureen returned home I’d begun to feel banished—driven into exile by those alien footsteps. I had also begun to feel a deprivation, as if I’d been condemned to experience Maureen’s niece solely through the act of hearing. I felt—the word sprang up in me—haunted. Yes, I was haunted by this unseen creature who dragged her way through the house like an invisible monster in a tale for children. By dinnertime I could no longer stand it and had contrived a plan.

Andrea, as I’ve said, had a restless habit of climbing up to her room. My plan was quite simple: I would catch a glimpse of her in the upstairs hall. With that in mind I descended the stairs and positioned myself on the step just behind the attic door. I knew that she always turned the hall light on when she reached the top of the carpeted stairs and turned it off on the way back down. I listened for her slowly climbing footsteps, heard the click of the switch, saw the line of light under the attic door. The footsteps passed directly before me and down the hall to her room. She did something in her closet. The footsteps returned to the hall. For all I knew, Maureen’s niece was a pair of ambulating feet without a body. The footsteps passed me and moved in the direction of the landing. The moment the light clicked off, I emerged from behind the door.

The hall was dark at one end and illuminated at the other by the light over the landing. I came out in time to see Maureen’s niece standing at the head of the four carpeted stairs that led to the landing and the larger stairway below. She was wearing a loose-fitting long dark skirt and a dark sweater buttoned over a blouse. What struck me was the slope of her shoulders. It suggested a terrible weariness, the weariness of defeat—there was in it a whole history of disappointments, of failed expectations. She seemed to pause there, at the top of the stairs, her head slightly bowed, as if readying herself for the difficulties of descent. She reached out a hand to the wooden rail, stood motionless for a moment, and stepped out of sight.

I returned to the attic with the sense that I hadn’t satisfied but only stimulated my curiosity. The glimpse I’d had of her was so brief that I would not have been able to recognize her in a photograph. Of her face I’d seen only a narrow pale streak, next to a broad dark streak of hair. She looked like a dashed-off sketch in an artist’s notebook. I had planned to listen for her final return to her room and then go down to Maureen for my nightly visit. Now I decided to wait for her; to watch.

It is never clear to us how visible we are to you. I thought it best to keep out of sight, like the victim of a disfiguring accident. Not far from her room was a linen closet with shelves of sheets, pillowcases, and folded towels. I entered that closet and waited for her return.

She spent a long time with her aunt that night. Wisps of conversation drifted up to me like cigarette smoke. I was trying to decipher a sound that suggested a piece of wood tapping against glass when I heard her footsteps on the stairs. She climbed slowly, as if at the end of a long hard day that had drained her of energy, even though she’d gotten up only a few hours before her aunt returned from work. I heard the click of the hall light at the top of the stairs. I listened to her steps approach the linen closet and pass by. I heard her turn the doorknob and click off the light switch at her end of the hall. At that moment I emerged.

She stood with her hand raised against the partially open door to her room. I was much closer to her than I had imagined—some half-dozen steps away. Although the light from the landing was on, the hall was nearly dark where she stood. I could see her face in three-quarter profile: the tired anxious eyes, the mouth turned down at the corners, the fleshiness under her small chin. There was a heaviness about her—like her aunt, she had the look of an overgrown schoolgirl, with something mournful thrown in. Her hair was thick and heavy, and fell into a tangle of curls at her shoulders. She had so much hair that I wondered whether she liked to hide behind it. All this in an instant—she had already pushed open the door and was halfway through.

But now she stopped—abruptly—and glanced back into the hall, as if she’d sensed something behind her. Her gaze swept down the hall, toward the well-lit landing. Then she entered her room quickly and closed the door.

“At last!” Maureen whispered, as I settled into my chair. “I thought she’d never go!”

12

The next day, a Saturday, Andrea rose late and went off with her aunt for a drive in the country, to look at the turning leaves. I’d grown used to hearing her shuffle about the house all day in what sounded like very soft slippers, and the silence and emptiness irritated me—filled me with a devouring impatience. We are not good at whiling away the time, we others. We don’t know how to take it easy. Loafing is not for us. Anxiety’s our pastime, desperation our sport. For a long time I zigzagged back and forth across the attic like a bored beetle. At some point I discovered that I was moving down the stairs and out into the second-floor hall. For a moment I stood before Andrea’s door, telling myself to go back, go back. Do not enter. Mistake. Go back. Sunlight filled the room like an angry crowd. At first I could barely see. Brightness lay over objects like a sheet. Then details began to emerge—a patch of pink, a swirl of blue. The curtains were pink and flouncy, drawn back with tasseled curtain ties. On the ruffled white quilt with its pattern of gigantic blue blossoms lay a big brown pocketbook and a roll of mints. On top of a chest of drawers I saw a white porcelain angel who rested one hand on the shoulder of a blue-eyed porcelain girl. A wooden clock shaped like an apple with a stem hung on one wall. On another I saw a framed painting of a girl with blond pigtails sitting on a swing and eating a pear. A dark blue suitcase sat in one corner.

From this bright and happy world I retreated into the black night of the closet. Two long skirts hung beside a fleece bathrobe. Wooden and wire hangers stretched away. A pair of fuzzy pink slippers sat on the floor.

A fine picture!—the stalker in the closet, waiting for the unsuspecting young woman to enter her bedroom. But that isn’t at all what it struck me as being, at the time. At the time I felt curious, dissatisfied—I wanted to know more about her. That was all. For us, hiddenness holds no pleasure. It’s nearness we crave—nearness and revelation.

I heard everything: the car pulling up, the footsteps leading to the back porch, the slamming of the screen door. Voices, a sneeze. A thump on a table. On the carpeted stairs her footsteps were heavy and slow. The sharp turn of the knob came a moment before I’d expected it. She was—as if suddenly—in the room. The bed creaked. I was puzzled by the next sounds, followed by a familiar thunk that explained things in reverse: she had untied a shoe and dropped it on the floor. People in rooms move around more than one might think. They pick things up, they put things down, they stride up and down like madmen, they look out of windows, they glance into mirrors, they push on. They never stop. A drawer slid open, changed its mind, slid back. A knock—a scrape—a creak of the bed. Many creaks of the bed. Had she picked up a book? Her breathing grew slow. I heard no turning of a page. I waited a little longer before I emerged from the closet.

The sunlight—the horrible sunlight—how can I explain? It was like a fistful of sand flung in my face. Even as I struggled against the glare I realized that it was softer than before—she had turned up the slats of the two blinds. Gradually I made out her form on the bed. I had expected to find her fast asleep, but she lay on her back with her eyes open. A book lay facedown on her stomach; it rose and fell slowly. She wore a long black skirt and a dark brown blouse. Her large bare pale feet were crossed at the ankles. I could see her broad face clearly: the somewhat petulant mouth, the heavy-lidded eyes, the large space between the bottom lip and the jaw. She wasn’t what anyone would call an attractive woman. I cared nothing about that. I took her in gratefully, hungrily. We are greedy, we others. We can never have enough.

I’d been observing her eagerly, in a kind of daze of concentration, when I was startled into alertness. Andrea had sat up. She had sat up swiftly, violently, with a hand clutching the V of her blouse. She looked around the room in a series of quick sharp motions of her head, with startled pauses between. Even I looked about for a moment, in search of an intruder. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat suddenly motionless. She was leaning forward a little, as if preparing for a leap. Her immobility unnerved me more than her fierce movements. She turned her head—another abrupt motion. She sat there. She listened. She sprang up and was at the door. With her hand on the knob she looked back into the room—at the closet, at the window—and vanished.

I laughed: the short, bitter laugh that gives no relief. Then, without thinking, I stepped over to the bed, bent over, and inhaled deeply. Some claim that we have no sense of smell, we others, but I can tell you that I was penetrated by the odors curling up from that bed: the laundered, lemony smell of the white-and-blue quilt itself, the darker aroma of her clothes, the sting of a hand lotion, and the fresh-acrid scent of her body, which made me think of rye-bread toast and salted boiling water.

Behold the creature of bitter laughter!—bent over the bed in a posture of abasement. I glanced over my shoulder, as if to catch someone spying on me. But wasn’t the whole point that she hadn’t seen me at all?

I returned to the attic, where I roamed among cast-off things—my comrades, my companions in exile. Impatiently I awaited the sound of her footsteps on the carpeted stairs. That day she remained below. I waited through dinner, listened for the move into the living room. What did the two of them have to talk about? Hadn’t they talked enough for one day? For a whole lifetime? I restrained myself, I crushed down my impulse to be a secret witness. Her footsteps climbed the stairs. She entered the room. After a suitable time, I went down to Maureen.

She was standing in the dark, smoking a cigarette. I had never seen her smoke before. “She suspects something,” she said, in a conspiratorial whisper, and began to walk melodramatically up and down before the couch. As she paced, she held one forearm pressed across her stomach, with the hand cupping the elbow of the upright arm. She whirled and looked at me. “She knows.”

13

What she actually knew was less clear than that she didn’t want to know too much. Andrea had apparently told her aunt that she’d sensed something—something in the hall, something in her room—and had thought at first it might be an intruder before she’d realized that her mind was playing tricks on her. So much at least I gathered through the sharp bursts of cigarette smoke that erupted from Maureen like hisses of steam. At one point she turned to me and said in a fierce whisper: “We’ve got to be careful. She knows, she knows. Oh, she doesn’t know she knows, but she knows. Hssst!” Here she held up a hand, turned her head sharply, listened. She shrugged. “I thought—” She listened again. “Do you think she’s listening?” She waved at the smoke with swift short strokes of her hand, as if someone might be hiding in there.

Later, on my way to the attic, I lingered in the upstairs hall. Maureen had a habit of going to the refrigerator for a drink of bottled water and a bite of whatever lay at hand before she climbed the stairs to get ready for bed. In the unlit hall I stood before Andrea’s door. A line of light showed under it. I could hear the turning of a page, the creak of bedsprings. My desire to enter the room was so powerful that I could feel it penetrating the door and coming out on the other side. But already I could hear Maureen’s footstep on the carpeted stairs. Back in the attic I listened to her enter her room, across from Andrea’s.

Please understand: it had been scarcely five weeks since I’d fled from my house through the dark dawn. I knew some things, but not many, about the conditions of my new existence. Even so, I recognized that my behavior had taken a turn toward the—well, toward the bizarre. I had always been a quiet man; a man of regular habits; a conventional man, if I may put it that way without the sneer that usually accompanies such a description. My relations with Maureen, peculiar though they might seem to an outsider, made entire sense to me. What didn’t make sense was my behavior toward Andrea. I was no bender and sniffer, no lurker in ladies’ closets. What had come over me?

Let me speak for a moment about the nature of our desire. We do not understand it, we others. Our relation to the world in which we find ourselves is murky at best. We possess the faculty of sight, though we see best in the dark. We hear, but the sound of our own voices is always disturbing to us. We are entirely without the sense of taste. Some of us are without the sense of smell, though I am not one of them. Many of us claim that we are without the sense of touch, though it’s well known that we can adapt our shapes to the shapes of the world—we can sit on couches, stand on floors, climb steps. I would argue that we have a memory of touch, a shadow-touch that permits us to conform to your world. What then of desire? Our desire resembles yours in certain respects, with this difference: it expects nothing, it believes in nothing. Above all, it does not believe in itself. Why should it? We know who we are, we others. We are not-you. We have nothing to do with you. Which is to say, we have only to do with you—for without you, we are even less than ourselves, we are less than absences. Is this clear? Nothing is clear. A murky business, as I’ve said.

As for Andrea, I knew only that I craved to be near her—to be as near her as possible. I did not crave to see her naked body. Such desires have nothing to do with us. But the desire to be near, to be as near as possible, to be nearer than is possible, to mingle, to merge, to lose ourselves in the substance of a living creature—that is what we desire, when we desire.

After Maureen was safely in her room, I found myself in the upstairs hall before Andrea’s door. I say “found myself” because I became aware of standing there without any memory of having descended the attic stairs. A moment later I was inside the room. It was entirely dark—she had closed and lowered the blinds and drawn the curtains—and it was only now, in that room, that I realized how very well I was able to see in the dark. She lay on her back with her head turned to one side and one arm lying across her stomach. The sleeve of her pajama top had been pulled back to the middle of her large forearm. I sat down on the end of the bed, next to the place where her feet pushed up under the covers. I felt gratified to be near her. I felt more than gratified, I felt soothed, as if my existence were a bleeding sore for which she—but this is a horrible metaphor. I leave it here as evidence of my agitation.

Andrea was a restless sleeper—I had known this before. What I hadn’t known was how much, in sleep, she remained in motion. She moved each of her shoulders; her hands shifted position; her head turned until she was facing straight up. Then her whole body began to roll over. I had the impression that her body was a train traveling through the night, while she lay fast asleep on a berth somewhere inside. Now she lay on her outstretched arm. Now she turned again, onto her stomach. She took a deep breath, and was still—then rolled onto her back. She said, very distinctly, the syllable “nong.” She sighed. She opened her eyes.

I hadn’t expected her to open her eyes. She saw me—I saw her see me. She sat up violently, holding the collar of her pajama top against her throat. The gesture reminded me of her aunt. She held up her forearm, as if to prevent a blow to the face. I heard myself speak—that distant, despairing sound—and with a cry she leaped from the bed and rushed to the door, where she fumbled at the knob before escaping into the hall.

I continued to sit there, paralyzed with shame, while outside I heard Andrea tear open the door of her aunt’s room and cry out “Oh god—oh god—” and as I rushed from that cry and hurled myself up the attic stairs, I could hear the women talking together, very fast.

14

In my high lair I paced and brooded. What else was there to do? I had seen the look of terror on Andrea’s face and I could imagine with dreadful ease the dark thoughts of Maureen. I kept out of sight all day Sunday and came out only when it was safe. Maureen was waiting for me in the darkened living room. As soon as I appeared she whispered, “You scared the life out of her! She’s practically—how could you?” She paced in a haze of smoke, waving her cigarette. “I told her it was all a dream. I think she—but she knows. She knows. I made her doubt her own eyes. I can’t believe that you—in her room, of all places. What were you doing in her room?” I stood there stiffly while she shouted in whispers. Smoke swirled around her like river mist. Light from the kitchen caught her barrettes, her eyes. She looked like a creature in a chamber in hell. Jealousy flared in her like fire. “I thought we had an agreement—an understanding—” She flung herself heavily onto the couch. Her head lay against the couch-back. A hand fell to her lap.

I breathed out an apology and made an awkward exit. I had no excuses, nothing to say. Outside, in the night, I threw myself from one refuge to another, in search of calm, but there was no calm. I had terrified one woman and mortified another—it was time for me to banish myself to the ends of the earth. But where does the earth end? The earth never ends. Besides, where could I go, really? It was also true that I wanted desperately to return and set things right—I who was wrong in my very existence.

Back in the attic I paced and paused, paced and paused, like someone with a memory disorder who is searching for something that keeps vanishing from his mind.

Have I spoken of the dawn? We do not like the dawn. We object to its youthful radiance. We dislike its suggestion of new beginnings, of the uplifted spirit. We are creatures of the downward-plunging spirit, where hope perishes in black laughter. Some claim that at dawn we cease to exist, that we dissolve in light. Blissful thought! But that is pure superstition—or careless observation. No, we’re there, always there, though in a weakened and faded way, like flowers that bloom only after sunset.

Dawn came. It was Monday morning: a school day. Maureen was soon stirring. When I heard her leave, I understood that I wasn’t going to remain locked up in the attic like an insane relative shut away from the healthy part of the house. It was absolutely necessary for me to know that Andrea was all right. I understood that I was behaving foolishly, even recklessly, and that my desire to assure myself of Andrea’s wellbeing was a mask for my imperious need to be in her presence.

I had known from days of listening that Andrea spent her time drifting about the house, but as I followed her—at a safe distance—I was impressed by the number and intricacy of her rituals of wasting time. In her long robe and big fuzzy slippers she sat at her late breakfast in front of an open newspaper that she folded carefully along the crease each time she turned the page. After this she folded the paper exactly in half and then in half again. Every few minutes she rose to go to the silverware drawer, or check the faucet in the sink, or look for something on the counter, or gaze out the kitchen window while she sipped her coffee. Later she brought her coffee and the newspaper into the living room, where she turned on the television and flipped through channels, never watching a program for more than three minutes at a time. She rummaged through her large pocketbook and removed a big comb that she pulled for a while through her hair. She went to the front door, opened it, and looked out. In the kitchen she rinsed one of her dishes and placed it in the dishwasher. In the living room she closed the blinds of each window and then partly opened them again. Once, in the kitchen, she looked around suddenly. I was standing closer to her than I had realized, but she saw nothing. She liked to rub the side of her nose, stretch out her arms, fling herself onto the couch. A moment later she would stand up and go into the kitchen, where she opened the refrigerator and peered inside with a studious frown.

Intermixed with her restless rituals was a different species of behavior, a nervous alertness or watchfulness that I observed with interest. She would turn her head suddenly, as if she’d seen something out of the corner of her eye. Or she would stop in the middle of a room, where she grew tense and still, listening with stern attention. It was as if she knew she wasn’t alone, in that empty house, in the middle of the empty day. And an irritation came over me, for I had done my part, had I not, I had kept well out of sight, hadn’t I?

At the sound of Maureen’s car in the drive I retired to the attic. I could hear the vigorous sounds of their voices, crisscrossing far below. Perhaps they were arguing—what did I know of these women? For that matter, what did I know of myself? Of anything? Then I thought: My name is Paul Steinbach. I have fallen asleep in my bed. This is all a dream. Even as I welcomed the thought, I was repelled by its ludicrous triteness. There was nothing to do but wait. I waited. I waited for the sounds of dinner. I waited for the move to the living room. I waited for the slow, dragging footsteps on the stairs.

Scarcely had the door closed when I found myself rushing down the attic steps to the hall. In a moment I was at the landing. As I made my way down to Maureen, I became aware that I was moving more and more slowly, as if impeded by some substance in the air. By the time I reached the bottom I discovered that I had come to a complete stop—as in the old days, I couldn’t help thinking. But these were the new days, weren’t they? Maureen was sitting on the couch, in her storm-cloud of smoke. Ah, she was tired, desperately tired—she was coming unraveled before me. Her hair hung down carelessly. A button of her blouse was undone, revealing the bottom edge of a ghostly white bra. She sat there, a tired, middle-aged woman. I could feel harm flowing from me like ripples of heat.

I turned around and went back. Yes!—a coward. I confess it. Shall I say it again? A coward. She would have looked at me accusingly—pleadingly. I couldn’t—I couldn’t. In the attic I fell into a restless stupor. Dutifully I moved among her old things. Have I mentioned the porcelain cookie jar shaped like a panda? In a dusty green bowl lay an old eggbeater and a pink rubber ball. As I paced the floorboards I felt like an aging actor in an empty theater. At some point I heard Maureen’s footsteps on the carpeted stairs. The footsteps irritated me, since they meant it was now impossible for me to go down to her. Even my irritation irritated me, for, when all was said and done, what good did it do me or anyone to know, with absolute clarity, that I had failed to rise to an occasion?

I was wondering how I would drag myself through the rest of the appalling night, while the two women in their big soft beds lay calmly out of it all, when the world burst open with a roar. That is to say: a sudden noise was followed by a jolt of light. The light swept across the rafters. It withdrew. I understood that the door to the attic had opened and a flashlight was shining up. She was climbing toward me. The beam of light wavered along the stairs like low fire. I saw her rising slowly into view like a creature from the sea. I slipped behind a child’s bookcase filled with old puzzles and Golden Books. Through a crack in the flimsy back I could see her take two steps into the attic and turn off her light. “You’re here, I know you are,” she shouted in a whisper. “Are you here? Paul! Where are you? Why didn’t you—” The flashlight burst into life—the beam swept across the floorboards, leaped to the rafters, rippled across the dressmaker’s dummy and the old typewriter in the sewing basket. Off with the light—darkness swarmed back. “She told me there’s something in the house—she’s sure of it. She asked whether I’d ever—whether I’d ever seen—” She sighed. Then, in a fierce whisper: “Never!” She continued more mildly. “She won’t sleep in her room anymore. Can you imagine? Too haunted in there, ha ha. Now she sleeps with me, like twenty years ago. A bit crowded in there, as I’m sure you can imagine. Well”—in a merry voice—“now you’ll have to visit both of us! But you know”—here her voice dropped—“I’m so tired …” I heard her shuffle forward in the dark. “Oh, where are you? Paul? I know you’re somewhere.” The flashlight sprang on and she moved about, her beam of light held out before her like a sword. “You can’t hide from me!” A moment later she said, “Please, Paul. What have I done? I’m sorry.” Wearily she turned around. I could see the light shining on her moccasin slippers trimmed with red beads and white fur. She walked down the stairs, clutching the rail. I watched as she sank back into the sea.

15

At the sound of the attic door closing I felt a sudden stillness of relief. At the same time, in the center of that stillness, I could already detect the stirrings of the opposite of relief. That’s how we are. Our rest is unrest, our peace is unpeace, our hopefulness has a heart of doom. Things were spinning out of control. I wanted to calm it all down, immediately, forever. Yes, I wanted to assure everyone that things would be all right, in the long run. If anyone had had the gall to assure me that things would be all right, in the long run, I’d have looked at them as one might look at an elderly woman in a nursing home who has said that she is waiting to join her dear mother in heaven. But there I was, eager to spread comfort wherever I could, even as I seemed to hear, behind my back, a howl of mocking laughter.

I hurried down the attic steps with no definite idea of what I was going to do. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I knew precisely what I was going to do but concealed it from myself cunningly. In my mind there was nothing but an image—those moccasin slippers, trimmed with red beads and white fur. There they floated, helpless and forlorn. It seemed to me that I needed to protect them, to save them from harm. Swiftly—like a cleansing wind—I entered Maureen’s room.

She was sitting up in bed, in the dark, supported by a pillow that stood upright against a reading pillow with arms. “You can’t—” she whispered, in that stifled shout. At the edge of the bed lay Andrea. She was on her side, facing the wall. Only her cheek was visible above the turned-back sheet. At Maureen’s stifled words, Andrea opened her eyes and lazily turned onto her back. “What did you—” she said, and saw me. Clutching the sheet to her chest with one hand, she pushed herself back against the headboard and held up the other hand, as if directing traffic to stop. Maureen leaned forward in my direction, shaking her head and saying “No … no …” I looked at the two women sitting up side by side, their bodies touching, one pressed back against the headboard, the other straining forward, and what I most wanted, at that moment, was for one of them to move forward a little and the other to move back, so that both of them would be sitting shoulder to shoulder, looking at me with an air of quiet expectation, and in order to encourage this new arrangement I said, “What I want to say—” But at the sound of my voice, which startled me like a groan, Andrea held up a forearm in front of her face, while Maureen lifted her head alertly, raised both arms, as if she were offering me a tray of chocolate chip cookies, and let them fall heavily onto the spread, where they lay with the palms up. Unnerved by my voice, and by the sight of the two women, one staring at me from behind an arm held out across her face, the other looking sadly at me with her hands lying upside down on the spread, I felt like a man in a mask who had broken into a bedroom at night, and with a breath of apology, which sounded to me like the rattling of a distant chain, I left them there.

I left them there, but not so that I might disappear into the attic like another broken doll. No, the entire house now seemed to me a place of misery—I was eager to escape into the night. Exactly what I thought I might do, out there in the night, was as uncertain as my larger fate, but I found myself drifting from yard to yard, as on that first, fatal morning. After a while I saw that I’d come to a familiar neighborhood. I crossed a street, made my way through hedges and fences, and entered the Delvecchio backyard, with its flagstone patio shaded by a canvas top. The sprinkler and the soccer ball were gone, replaced by a leaf rake standing against the side of the garage. I passed through the tall hedge and stopped.

Nothing had changed. There stood my small back porch, with the four wooden steps and the white posts under the gabled roof. There was the cellar window with the taped pane. I wondered whether Paul Steinbach, M.D., was inside, asleep in his bed. I wondered whether he’d remembered to return that book.

In the kitchen I was startled by the refrigerator. It had become much larger in my absence. In the dish rack I saw a plate with a solid band of color along the rim, instead of the apples and leaves that ought to have been there. Somehow the old stove with its four burners had been replaced by one of those glass-topped ones. It was as if the house, in my absence, had decided to dress up in some way, like a child left alone in its parents’ bedroom. Upstairs in the hall I lingered before a familiar door—his door. What, it occurred to me to ask myself, was I doing in this house, which had abandoned me long ago? But it was too late, already I was in the bedroom, where an alien chest of drawers stood against the wrong wall. In a bed with no headboard a man lay on his side. He had a straight sharp nose, with a raw pinkness at the bridge, where his eyeglasses must have rubbed. The rimless glasses rested on their wire temples on a book at the base of a new lamp. On the cover of the book was a photograph of a woman with a boa and a feather hat. Perhaps, I thought, I had fallen asleep many years ago and lay dreaming there. In my dream I had come to this place. And if I should wake?

The sleeper stirred. He muttered something, moved a shoulder, and lay still. An eye began to open. It fell languidly shut. It opened again. Now the man began a scramble, a sideways tangled sluggish rush among the bedclothes as he tried to twist away from me. One arm, caught in the sheets, beat about like a broken wing. I had the feeling that I was watching the antics of an amateur actor who exaggerated his effects. Something shattered against the wall behind me. I looked at the floor and saw the scattered pieces of a clock. Had he thrown it at me? “It’s mine!” I wanted to shout, meaning the room, the house, his life. He was glaring at me with a mixture of wildness and wariness—a man in striped pajamas, rudely awakened in the middle of the night. In the morning he would recall his dream with bewilderment, with interest. There was nothing for me in this place.

Out in the yard I hesitated. I had fled from one home, only to be driven from another. I imagined searching for a new attic, in a new town, where I would start a new—but at this thought I could feel something stirring deep within me, and all at once I burst into a laugh. It was not a pleasant laugh, that laugh. But then, ours are not pleasant laughs. I turned and made my way through the hedge.

As I approached Maureen’s neighborhood I became aware of a glow over the dark trees. I crossed a lawn, passed through the stand of spruce, and stopped in her backyard.

The house was ablaze with light. At any moment I expected to see flames bursting through the windows, leaping up toward the roof. By which I mean: all the lights were on—the kitchen overhead light, the sink light, the dining room light, the floor lamp and the table lamps in the living room, the stair light, the hall light, the bedroom lights, the bathroom lights. Even the back-porch light flung its harsh brightness across the lawn. Were they trying to drive me out by light? Like a crazed lover or father I stumbled across the brilliant grass into the blazing house. I rushed up the fiery stairway into the hall. The sharp light cut into me like splinters of glass. Behind the bedroom door I could hear them breathing quietly. I would never let them drive me from my attic. Even up there, the light was on—a single bare bulb that gave off a garish glow. Where there is light, there is dark. I made my way blindly toward a dark corner and threw myself down on the floor behind a row of peeling suitcases. A rag doll lay facedown beside me. Her yellow string hair streamed out like the rays of a child’s sun. I tried to think what to do.

16

I was in the midst of imagining myself on the move, passing from attic to attic, across alien lawns, through unknown towns, in remote lands, as strangers in beds rolled wildly in their sheets and clocks shattered against walls, when the attic light went out. In the sudden darkness I heard the closing of a door. Footsteps shuffled in the hall below. It struck me that I had sunk so deeply into my thoughts that I hadn’t heard the attic door open or the switch click off. Through the attic window the sky was black. For a while I lay there trying to make sense of it all. Was it still the same night? We are careless about time. We have too much of it. With a wary kind of suddenness I rose and passed across the attic and down the wooden stairs.

In the hall it was dark. I could hear the sound of breathing in Maureen’s room and the sound of movement down below.

When I reached the bottom of the carpeted stairs I saw that all the lights were out. At one end of the couch, Andrea sat tensely upright in her bathrobe.

I entered the room and started to walk behind the couch, thought better of it, and passed in front of her. Without incident I reached my armchair and sat down.

“I’m not afraid of you anymore,” she said quietly.

She glanced over at me and looked away. “I was afraid before,” she said. “But I decided not to be.” A pause. “I want to get to know you.” She continued to sit upright, like a student in a principal’s office.

Something about her awkwardness put me—I was going to say: at ease. But we are never at ease. It’s more accurate to say that the unease which is my nature became a little less uneasy, like a fist relaxing slightly—the knuckles are no longer white, but the fist remains closed.

“I turned on all the lights,” she said. “But later I went back and turned them all off.” She raised a hand to her hair, wound a strand round and round a finger, then removed her finger and lowered her hand. She turned her head toward me and held it there.

She continued to hold it there as I began to speak. My voice sounded to me like the rustle of dry leaves. Even in my past life I was a man of few words, but on this night I told my story: the unbreathing figure in the bed, the dawn flight, the wooden steps to the attic, the visits to her aunt. It occurred to me, with surprise, that I really did have a story to tell.

When I came to the end I waited for her to pour out her own story, but she said simply, “Thank you.” A sudden yawn, deep and shuddering, seized her. She thrust a hand across her mouth as if she were trying to stifle a laugh. “Oh god,” she said. “That had nothing to do with—it’s just so late. Look! It’s practically morning.” Through the drawn drapes I could see a faint lightness.

She stood up. “She’ll worry about me.” She looked at me. “I hope we can be friends now.” At once she turned away, walking with great strides, swinging out of sight and thrusting herself heavily up the stairs.

Above, a door shut. I remained alone in the empty room. I imagined Andrea striding fiercely through the house, turning on light after light, faster and faster. When all the lights are on, she returns to Maureen’s room. She lies down on the bed with her eyes open. She says nothing. After a while she gets up. She looks around. Then she walks back through the house, turning each light off, one after the other.

17

The next day it rained. It was one of those violent autumn rains that hurl themselves against roofs and attic windows, while through the water-sheeted glass there’s nothing to see but the bleak dark sky and the branches bending in the wind. The attic was dusky-dark. A good day for solitude! That was the thought that presented itself to my mind as I made my way down the attic stairs in search of—something else. Through the storm I had heard Maureen’s car backing out of the drive. I was struck by the gloom of the upper hall, as if the storm clouds had penetrated the house itself. Then I saw that the shade had been drawn on the window at the end of the hall and the two ruffled curtains pulled together. For some reason I thought: They have left me here, they have all gone away. When I reached the bottom of the carpeted stairs I saw that all the shades had been drawn and the curtains closed. A sullen day-darkness hung in the house. Andrea was sitting on the couch, in her bathrobe, erect but with half-closed eyes.

She raised an arm and swept her hand vaguely sideways before letting it drop to the couch cushion. It rose and came to rest in her lap. “I wanted you to feel—welcome,” she said, without turning to look at me.

I walked past the couch in silence and settled into my armchair. The word “welcome” had irritated me, and I looked at her without pleasure. I wanted to shout: We never feel welcome!—but I sat there, listening to the windows rattling behind the closed curtains. I stared at her large hands resting awkwardly in her big lap.

She said, “Auntie Maur told me you like to—I don’t know, sit with her at night, and I thought maybe if we—I like rain, rainy days.” She paused. “It’s all right if you don’t feel like talking. We can just sit here.”

After a while she said, “I’m going to make some tea now. I think a cup of tea would be nice. I’ll be right back.”

I watched her go slowly past my chair into the kitchen. There was strain in her face, and her stride was slightly wrong in some way, as if she were practicing a walk in front of a mirror. As I listened to her moving about in the kitchen, the thought occurred to me that now would be a good time to rise from my chair and pass out the door into the storm, never to return. I sat there thinking this thought and hearing the sound of the rain against the house, and of the teapot as she set it down on the stove.

All that dark morning she passed back and forth between the kitchen and the living room, carrying cups of tea, plates of crackers, glasses of juice. In the living room she would sit for a while over her tea, then stand up and go to a window. There she pushed aside a curtain and looked out at the rain. Moments later she would go over to the bookcase, take out a book, and bring it to the couch, where she opened it up and immediately put it aside. Sometimes she went into the kitchen, washed a cup, and set it in the dish rack to dry. Even when she sat still she was always in motion, stretching out her arms and interlocking her hands, or raking her fingers through her tangled hair. She rarely looked in my direction, but from time to time would utter a few words intended for me, such as “These rainy days are really something” or “I can see you better now.” Even as she moved restlessly about, I was sharply aware of her awareness of me. I noticed that she was very careful to keep a good distance between us at all times; but it was when she was farthest from me, across the room or hidden away in the kitchen, that I most had the feeling she had somehow wrapped an arm around me and brought me with her.

At lunchtime she carried her plate with its sandwich and her saucer with its cup of tea into the living room, where she placed them on the coffee table. She ate bending over awkwardly, while repeatedly wiping her mouth with a napkin.

After lunch she brought her dishes back to the kitchen and returned to sit on the couch. She leaned back and closed her eyes. Slowly her mouth began to open; she covered it with a hand. “Days like this,” she said, “make me sleepy.” She shifted on the couch. Then she stood up, pushed a hand through her hair, and began walking toward the stairway. There she stopped, glanced in my direction, and began climbing the stairs.

I listened to her clumping up the stairs in her fuzzy pink slippers. In the dusky light of the living room a restlessness came over me, and as I rose from the armchair I had the odd sense that she was watching me from the landing, even though she was no longer in view.

When I reached the top of the stairs, no one was there. I could hear the rain against the curtained window at the end of the hall. I made my way past the closed door of the attic to a door that stood partway open, and with a feeling of anxiety I entered Maureen’s room.

The curtain had been drawn. Andrea lay on one side of the bed with an arm over her eyes. I sat down on the other side of the bed and then lay down. I have already mentioned the sensation of danger that flares in us when the distance between us and you grows too close. That sensation was leaping in me as I lay on the bed beside this young woman with the fuzzy pink slippers who lay on her back with an arm flung over her face. But I was aware of a second sensation as well. This might be described as a sensation of disobedience, a rebellion against the very warning that sounded in me like a cry. It’s the feeling of a child who reaches toward the fire and, despite the heat scorching his hand, reaches farther. Was it perhaps only a desire to know? I forced myself closer to the flame, which in this case was also an icy wind. As I crossed the boundary I felt an unraveling, a fierce dissolution. Flesh stops at flesh—but we others, we mingle entirely, we invade and penetrate like rays of light, like dark smoke. I felt myself spreading through her like wind in a room. Who knows how long it lasted? At some point I found myself separate from her. I lay there unmoving. Tears of terror or tenderness lay on her cheek. Danger leaped along my side.

So I lay there listening to the rain against the draped windows. I became aware of pictures drifting before me: the book with the black dagger and the blood-red rose, Maureen raising her eyeglasses to the lamp, my father opening his black bag on the rug, Andrea standing at the end of the hall, her shoulders stooped and her head bent. Each picture seemed to contain a secret that eluded me. If I could grasp that secret, I would understand the universe. Then I became aware of my silence, as I lay there examining the pictures in my mind, and I recalled where I was, in the middle of an otherwise ordinary afternoon. I had the sensation that I was being looked at, and when I turned my head I saw a pair of dark tired eyes, much larger than I had remembered, looking at me with an air of expectation, as if it were my turn to say something in a conversation we had been having. Gradually her eyes changed, a dullness came over them, and she turned her head away. I was wondering what I ought to do to attract her attention when I became aware of a sound that was not the sound of the rain. It was at this moment that the door opened and Maureen entered the room.

She was stepping toward the bed and had begun to open her mouth, as if to address Andrea, for it must have seemed strange to her that the curtains were drawn in the living room and at the end of the hall, in the middle of the day, and in fact I detected in her face an expression of concern, as she looked at her niece lying in bed, in a darkened room. Her mouth was still opening when she saw me there. Her body stopped abruptly—she was leaning a little forward—and for a moment it looked as though every particle of her flesh had been replaced by a mineral deposit, as if she’d become a petrified tree, destined to remain there, leaning a little forward, with her mouth partly open, till the end of time. But gradually she came back to life, and straightening up, and raising a hand toward her cheek, without touching her face, she said, “No …” Then she began shaking her head slowly back and forth, like someone trying to get rid of a crick in her neck. Her “no,” although spoken quietly, must have been heard by Andrea, who removed her arm from her face and half raised herself on one elbow as she stared at her aunt with large, nervous eyes. “No,” Maureen said again, still shaking her head, and she began stepping backward toward the door. “Auntie Maur!” said Andrea. “It’s all right, I was just lying here.” But at this Maureen drew herself up and said in a loud voice, “I trusted you,” and raising a hand she pointed a finger at her niece. Now it was Andrea who began shaking her head, while she ran a hand through her hair and started to open her mouth, which she closed at once as if she’d thought better of what she was about to say, before she lowered her eyes beneath her aunt’s fierce stare. But now Maureen, like someone who had exhausted herself in a prolonged outburst, dropped her hand to her side, and with a distracted glance that swept across Andrea’s half-lifted torso and the lower part of my face, she took a final step backward out of the room and closed the door. As the door shut, Andrea reached out her arm, as if to pull the door back open, and kept her arm suspended there, as if she’d forgotten it.

I understood that it was of vital importance for me to go to Maureen immediately, and with this end in mind I rose from the bed and stepped over to the door. Andrea was still leaning up on an elbow, but her extended arm had fallen a little, and the fingers of her outstretched hand had begun to droop. Her fuzzy pink slippers, her dark robe partly open at the throat, her broad pale neck, her big forearm on the bed, all this made me think for some reason of a sad queen who had lost her kingdom, and I tried to remember whether I had ever read such a story. But time was passing, I could already hear sounds coming from the stairs, and with a nod toward Andrea, who was staring at her feet, I hurried into the hall.

18

Behind the curtains of the living room, rain spattered against the windows like bits of ice. The couch and the chairs were empty. “Maureen!” I called, in a voice like distant rolling barrels. In the kitchen I found two plates in the dish rack, a white cup on the table. Around the dark table in the dining room, with its blue cut-glass bowl, four chairs sat neatly in place. Had anyone ever sat at that table? Then it struck me that the footsteps I’d heard had perhaps come from those other stairs, leading up to my own domain. Quickly I mounted the steps to the attic, where in the afternoon rainlight it was less dark than in the curtained living room. “Maureen!” I called, trying not to listen to my voice, but she was nowhere. I walked among the piles of labeled boxes and the old chairs, looked behind the dresser and the child’s bookcases, but the attic was deserted. Then I went back downstairs and roamed the empty rooms, looking over my shoulder from time to time as though I suspected her of sneaking up behind me. From the kitchen I stepped onto the open back porch. Chimes near a porch post rocked in the wind. Gusts of rain blew across the floor. When I raised my eyes I saw Maureen striding across the stormy yard, carrying an aluminum stepladder toward the sugar maple.

I hurried down the porch steps and out into the fierce rain, but she ignored me or perhaps could no longer see me. She placed the six-step ladder beside the wooden swing that hung from a thick branch and began to climb. Over one shoulder hung a length of rope. I did not like that rope and I began to call out to her, but my words blew away in the loud wind. Her wet dress clung to her as she climbed, her hair darted up and down like flames, her skin was shiny as a seal’s. On the fifth step she stopped, looked up as if she were peering into the rage of heaven, and flung an end of the rope over the branch. She looked like a big Girl Scout engaged in some woodland skill. She caught the loose end of the rope, tied a loop into it, and slid the other end through. When she pulled, the knot slipped upward and stopped against the branch. Then she began tying a second loop into the hanging end of the rope, while I shouted her name into the storm. Rain lashed her face. When she let the rope drop, a noose turned in the wind. She slipped it over her head and stood on the ladder, staring out into the rain. I waved my arms, shouted into the rain and wind. Then it seemed to me that, far from not seeing me, she saw me clearly and wished to be seen by me. I begged her to come down, I howled into the storm like a crazed dog. Desperately I ran to the ladder and began to climb, reaching out uselessly to her ankle, her leg. As if emboldened by my nearness she jumped, kicking over the ladder, which began to fall slowly, lazily, toward the soggy ground. The rope tightened around her neck and for a moment she hung there with her arms dangling awkwardly. Then the rope tore from the branch and she fell heavily to the ground. She lay on her side with the slick rope trailing from her neck like a monstrous artery.

I rushed over to her and knelt down. Somewhere a screen door slammed. Footsteps sounded heavily on the porch. Andrea came running down the steps into the yard and knelt in the sloshy grass beside her aunt, who was trying to push herself up. “I hurt my leg,” Maureen said, wincing as she sat partway up. Andrea sat down in the wet leaves and the rain and threw an arm about her. “It’s all right,” Andrea said. “Everything will be all right now.” She pressed her cheek against her aunt’s cheek. I had moved a little away and stood looking down on them, as they leaned together in the storm like a wet marble statue commemorating a battle. Then I looked up at the rainy bleak sky, which seemed to be darkening into night. “Go away,” someone said, and when I looked back down I was startled to see the two women staring up at me in rage and sorrow.

19

And so I have come to this place. No one will find me here. I ask no more.

I didn’t once look back as I walked away through the harsh rain. I could feel their gaze following me, rising slowly above me, hovering in the heavens like a fiery sign.

We others have no business with the likes of you.

When the restlessness comes, like a ripple of madness, I seek out my own kind. I attend a gathering, where I force myself to crush down that little eruption of revulsion. In an abandoned attic we consider our nature, we brood communally over our fate. Then we melt away into the empty places of the night.

It is said that we haunt you. It is far truer to say that you haunt us.

Here in my retreat, here where the world ends, I return to Maureen on her ladder. What seizes me isn’t her earnest awkwardness as she climbs, or her look of innocent and childlike stubbornness as she removes the rope from her shoulder and tosses it up to the branch. No, what I return to is the instant of the leap. For in that moment I detected in myself a little hot burst of envy. To know, at every second of your life, that you can kick over the ladder and jump into nothingness—what a glory that must be! For us there is no ladder, no leap. No way out.

I used to think of myself as a good man, who took care of his patients and protected them from harm. It may or may not have been so. But I can tell you that we are not good, we others. We bring harm to you. Already I have harmed two women. I offered one a false dream and drove the other to a rope and a tree.

And yet I maintain that they are far happier than we can ever be. For they will recover from my eruption into their lives. They will console themselves with hope. For that’s what you do: you console yourselves with hope. You console yourselves with the hope of a new beginning, of another day. We others do not console ourselves.

One question that arises at the gatherings is this: Why? Why us? We all ask it. Why? Why me? Some say that we are random events, equivalent to any other random event in Nature—the birth of the first self-replicating molecule in the primal soup, the extinction of a species of lizard. Others argue that there are no random events and that each of us can be accounted for by means of scientific laws that have yet to be formulated. Still others make the claim that we are being punished, though there’s disagreement over the nature of our crimes. I myself waver between the random-events theory and the theory of punishment, with a tendency to favor the second. For a time I believed we were being punished for not having lived fully enough, for having failed to seize the portion of life that was ours—hence our terrible longing. Now I have come to think that such an argument is too comforting, that it satisfies too readily our need for an explanation. No, if we are being punished, it’s because we once thought of ourselves as good.

We are bad for you, we others. We bring unhappiness. We have no words of comfort for you. We bring no tidings of joy. Do not look for us. Cover your faces when we’re near.

For we are always near. It’s true that I have taken myself away, to this place. But we are weak, as I’ve remarked before. Sooner or later a time will come when I will deceive myself. I’ll tell myself that I desire only a glimpse, a passing glance, no more. You will be sitting in your chair, or on your couch. You will sense a change in the room. Is it a draft? Can a window be loose? You will get up and go to the window, you will fiddle with the window lock. Then you’ll return to your chair, your couch. It is a quiet evening at home. You can tell that you’re feeling a little bored. You’ll wish, just for a moment, that something new might come into your life. If only the telephone would ring! If only someone would knock at the door! That is when you will feel something in the atmosphere. It’s as if a shadow has fallen across the back of your neck. It’s as if all the streetlights have gone out. Is it possible that you’re no longer alone in the room? You’ll feel that someone may be watching you. Is someone standing behind you? You will want to turn around. You will want to look. You will want to know. Don’t turn around. Don’t look. Don’t want to know.