The Barnum Museum: Stories

THE INVENTION OF ROBERT HERENDEEN

I trace the origin of my perilous gift to an idle morning in the fourth grade. I was seated at my desk before an open geography book with double columns of small print. A gray photograph in one corner showed a banana tree with a sharply focused trunk and high, blurred fruit. In front of me sat Diana Cerino. For a while I studied her complicated black hair and her two raspberry-red barrettes, one of which was tilted at a disturbing angle. I considered how I might go about fixing it without attracting her attention, but already I was losing interest in Diana Cerino’s barrette and in fact her entire existence and was wishing I’d bought one of the pink rubber balls I had seen that morning at Rappoport’s candy store in a shallow box next to the cash register. The box held a tightly packed layer of fifteen identical pink rubber balls arranged in three rows of five. A second layer of eight pink rubber balls rested neatly on the depressions formed by each group of four adjacent balls in the first layer. On the very top, where there was room for three more balls, sat a single pink rubber ball, king of the mountain. The balls cost fifteen cents apiece and I had exactly fifteen cents in my pocket but I had needed time to make up my mind. Now my desire for the unbought ball made me tense and irritable. The minute hand of the big round clock prepared for its jump but did not jump. I sometimes wondered about those clocks. Did time just stop during those suspended moments and then pass in a rush? Was an hour a kind of corpse that sat up with a grin once a minute, only to collapse again with its arms folded on its chest? Was my entire life going to consist of blank stretches of deadness punctuated by feverish rushes? The pink rubber ball would have sat very nicely on the pencil trough between my yellow pencil and the inkwell. Desperately I desired that ball. I saw its precise shade of dark pink, the hairbreadth raised line that encircled the ball and divided it exactly in two, the black, stamped star. I could smell a faint pink rubbery aroma, I felt a bursting sensation in my brain, and there, seated in my pencil trough between my yellow pencil and the inkwell…Ghostly and translucent, it seemed to be trembling slightly. I could see the dim glow of the overhead lights at the top of its smooth pink roundness, shading to darker pink toward the bottom. A peachlike pink bloom dusted the surface. Already my palm tingled in anticipation — but the minute hand jumped, Diana Cerino creaked in her seat, the phantom ball rolled from the desk, dropped to the floor, bounced silently away…

My name is Robert Herendeen. But really, should I continue? And here let me say that I begin this report against the grain of my own better nature, for I’ve never cared for the confessional tone so dear to our contemporary romantics. If in the course of this rigorous record I happen to bring forth my own feelings, it is I hope never for their own sake but solely for the sake of those other phenomena which I propose to examine in the clear light of — the clear light of! — and which, even now, when I look back on them — but this sentence is already quite long enough.

I was a precocious dreamer. At the age of one I lay in my crib and saw forest paths winding among fat trees full of cupboards and stairways. At five I imagined detailed houses with manypaned windows and precise fireplaces, all of which mocked the conventional squares with rectangle roofs that alone my childish fingers could manage. Yes, even then I was aware of the painful rift between the vivid images my mind created and the mediocre drawings, clay figures, and stories that I brought to birth in the material world — always to the hysterical praise of some aunt or schoolteacher, who would raise her clasped hands to her throat in an ecstasy of admiration. In the second grade I imagined a story that would fill many volumes and take up an entire shelf in the library, but somehow I never progressed beyond the first chapter. I invented wonderful toys that I never knew how to embody in actual wood or metal. One day in the fourth grade I saw on my desk a pink rubber ball but did not yet understand its meaning. I was very good at making detailed maps of South America and Australia, though I was reproached for my tendency to insert an eccentric twist of coastline here, a little green island just over there. I was well liked by my classmates and received A in everything, but my sense of secret failure was so sharp that I felt stunned with sorrow.

With the onset of adolescence my powers of imagination, so lively and varied during childhood, took a conventional turn. My sexual fantasies were precise, obsessive, and inaccurate. I was particularly fond of imagining the slow, the very slow, the dreamily slow raising of a dark wool skirt or light summer dress to reveal pastel underpants molding themselves to disturbing bulges. I imagined that girls were quite smooth under there, like rubber dolls, until one day a schoolmate with a beet-colored birthmark on his jaw carefully unfolded a wrinkled photograph. After that I imagined prodigious growths, exuberant and impossible burgeonings. In high school I amused myself by mentally removing the skirts and slips of girls who stood writing on the blackboard. I waited for them to turn, to look at the entire class seated in suspenseful silence, to begin to realize…but they never did, those brazen girls, they just brushed the chalk from their fingers and ambled back to their seats with that little tick-tock motion of hips as if nothing had happened. One evening in the winter of senior year I placed my right hand on the bare upper thigh beneath the charcoal-gray skirt of Carol Edmondston. She looked thoughtful, as if she were trying to remember an address. That spring I took up oil painting without success and planned with a friend a long summer trip that never materialized.

I went to a good but remote Eastern college and there, amid the hills and snows of northern New England, I became a serious student. I declared myself an idealist, despised all intellectual endeavor tainted by the practical, and double-majored in English and Philosophy, both of which I chose because they bore no relation whatever to actual life. I spent fourteen hours a day in the library and soon earned the respect of my professors, a fact that only heightened my sense of secret failure. About this time my first headaches began. One night in the spring of junior year I undressed Celia Ann Hodges on her oval braided rug during a romantic thunderstorm and was forced to make certain adjustments in the imaginary women who haunted my mind. In the summer between junior and senior year I wrote in ten weeks the draft of a six-hundred-page novel (ten pages a day, six days a week) but for some reason stopped at the end of the penultimate chapter and never completed it. In November, December, and January of senior year I began a comedy, a tragedy, and a tragicomedy, respectively, all three of which I destroyed one night during spring break. Shortly afterward I received Highest Honors for my senior thesis, “The Role of Metaphor in the Philosophy of Locke.” On the night before graduation I stayed up till dawn explaining to a girl I had met at midnight that great work can be accomplished only in solitude, and the next day, an hour after returning my cap and gown, I traveled by train to my family home in southern Connecticut.

My father, pleased by my good grades but troubled by the vagueness of my plans, had agreed to let me live at home for a year before I went to law school or business school or took some job or other or did something, anything. I moved into the spare room in the attic and threw myself into several ambitious literary projects, which soon came to nothing. I began to invent a series of artists’ lives that I planned to assemble in a book of fictional biographies, but one night I noticed that all of them were failed artists and I abruptly abandoned the plan. By mid-August I was going to bed at five in the morning and waking at one in the afternoon. I began reading long books, which fired my ambition without leading to anything in particular: The Anatomy of Melancholy, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the complete letters of Byron in twelve volumes. By October I was sullen and irritable. I refused to apply to graduate school, stating to my father that I would rather hang myself than enter a finishing school for mediocrity. My father said that I couldn’t hang myself without a rope and that a rope cost money. My father’s ironic attitude caused a coolness between us but he did not press matters after that. I began borrowing books on architecture from the library and invented in vivid detail gorgeous villas, gardens, palaces, country estates, amusement parks. On December 31 I wrote a thirty-four-page suicide note that I destroyed on January 1. In the spring I left home to work in a bookstore in a small town near my college and returned a month later with the plan for an American epic in fifty cantos, one for each state. My father agreed to support me for one more year if I promised to apply to business school in the fall. I returned to my attic life. The book came to nothing and I took up the study of Latin and Italian. At this period I began to have dull, gentle, persistent headaches, nothing bad, not really, but definitely noticeable. One warm spring night an exhilarating idea came to me.

In the week before my idea I had been puzzling over a problem. It seemed to me that a distinction should be made between two types of artistic sterility. In one type, the imagination remains a horrible blank, its mechanism simply refuses to create images, or else produces hopelessly banal or dead ones, greenish little corpses with waxen features. Would-be artists suffering from this form of sterility can do nothing but admit defeat, turning their attention to less exacting pursuits or perhaps shooting themselves between the eyes, as the case may be. In the second type, the imagination remains strong, perhaps too strong, and the sufferer’s torment consists in his inability to embody his meticulous imaginings in a medium. This type, though superficially resembling the first, since both issue in nothingness, is nevertheless far more hopeful, for its cure depends on the discovery and mastery of a medium. My own case was clearly of the second type, since my image-making faculty, far from being impaired, was almost disturbingly strong and resulted in vivid, detailed, elaborate eidola, which longed for release.

My parents’ house stood about a mile from a small public beach where I sometimes strolled at night. On the warm spring night when my idea came to me I was walking on the hard sand below the ragged line of mussel shells, cracked crabshells, and seaweed. The brilliant moon, much too round, gleamed in the wet flat sand by the water’s edge. I thought of my uncertain future, my failed past, my oddly becalmed present — cast up as I was in the attic of my father’s house — my restlessness, my wistfulness, my inner riot mixed with outer calm, my headaches, my eyeaches, my sense of not yet having entered into my proper adulthood combined with my sense of being eighty-seven years old, my rancor, my languor, my soul-soreness, my sighs. I was beginning to enjoy this list and wondered whether I could extend it indefinitely when all at once I felt tired, immensely tired, as if I had not slept in a long time. It occurred to me that I hadn’t really slept well for a long time, even as a child I was a terrible sleeper, the slightest noise startled me awake. By this time I had come to an abandoned lifeguard chair and in obedience to an obscure impulse I began climbing up the side in order to sit looking out over the moonlit water with a melancholy expression. It was as I was climbing up the side that my idea came to me and I reached the top in a state of high excitement. I decided to invent a human being by means of the full and rigorous application of my powers of imagination. Instead of resorting to words, which merely obscured and distorted the crystalline clarity of my inner vision, I would employ the stuff of imagination itself. That is to say, I would mentally mold a being whose existence would be sustained by the detail and energy of my relentless dreaming. My ambition was to create not an actual human being or a mere work of art but rather a being who existed in a realm parallel to the other two — a third realm, obedient to the laws of physical bodies but utterly discarnate.

I hadn’t expected my task to be an easy one, in fact I distrusted all forms of work accomplished without difficulty, but within a week I was snappish with failure. In my effort to be rigorous I had proceeded step by step, from the inside out, in the manner of a painter who imagines the musculature beneath the skin, but what I achieved was only a heap of dead parts — a rib cage, a pile of twisting bluish-red arteries, a carefully molded heel shading into vagueness. What I needed was something else, something else entirely. One night I thought of the name Olivia. At once an image formed. Silently she hovered before my imagination’s eye. There were vague places here and there, her hair was uncertain, I knew nothing about her knees, her nose, her history, but these were matters that I could attend to at leisure.

Leisure! Well, I suppose so. But from that moment I knew no peace, only the obscure ecstasy of creation. I made elementary errors, revised my mistakes, pushed on. Despite my vivid sexual imaginings in adolescence and beyond, despite Celia Ann Hodges, I had never made the attempt to visualize a girl or woman or any human being in exhaustive detail. I spent two nights and two days imagining her hands, summoning them out of vagueness into the precision of being. On the third night I realized that I had still failed to envision the exact pattern of veins on the back of each hand, the movements of the skin between the fingers, the intricate configuration of creases on each reddish knuckle. It seemed to me that only by an act of fanatical precision could I knit her into existence, rescue her from the continual tug of vagueness that is only one step removed from nothingness. I lavished a ferocity of attention on her eyelids, the folds and shadows of her ears, the muscles of her neck. Her clothes proved unexpectedly difficult to see precisely: the puckers of skirt at the waist, the arrangement of threads in the front and back of a button, the system of creases in the sleeve of a moving arm. Although she had appeared to me in a rather demure costume — dark blue denim skirt reaching to her knees, plain white cotton blouse with small transparent buttons — I rejected the temptations of modesty and applied to her breasts, her thighs, the folds of her vulva, the coloring and structure of her buttocks, the same rigor of attention that I applied to her eyebrows and toes.

Sometimes, in weariness, I removed my attention from her to contemplate some peaceful inner landscape. Then I returned in alarm to find odd gaps and distortions in her, as if without my sustained attention she tended toward dissolution. One night she walked from my desk to my reading chair and sat down; I realized that I had failed to imagine the precise system of motions that constitute a human walk, and threw myself into new feats of arduous imagining. Errors repeatedly erupted. One night when she walked from my attic room down two flights of stairs to the living room, I realized that I had been careless in managing her stair-by-stair descent, permitting her to fade away and reappear in the manner of a trite ghost.

It was these fadings, these absences of attention, that I found most difficult to overcome, in the laborious weeks that followed; and as the nights grew warmer, and through my attic window I smelled the dark green scents of summer and heard the shouts of children, the clang of a bell, the rush of roller skates on driveways, the soft thunk thunk of a dribbled basketball, I had the sense of being borne up by all the rich blue summer night and carried toward a far, desired shore.

On the night of July 16 my work was done. In the center of my dark room the unlit standing lamp with the bent brass neck stood looking down at the leather pad of my crowded desk. The cracked leather desk-chair where I had been sitting was partly turned to one side. I was lying on the bed by the double window, beneath the drawn blinds that reached to the bottom of the slightly raised windowframe. Bits of moonlight entered through the edges of the blinds and polished a leg of the mahogany desk, a few brass buttons in the back of the leather chair, a coffee cup resting on a book. She stood at the side of the desk, resting one carefully veined hand on a corner. She was gazing toward a window. Suddenly she lifted her other hand and swept a piece of hair back over an ear. It was a gesture we had practiced many times. Beneath the white cotton sleeve of her lifted arm I knew that a long vein in her forearm pressed through the skin and curved toward the inner bend of her elbow. Her nostrils tensed at the sound of a distant car; a faint breathing was audible. Perhaps it was a memory of the last feverish and draining months, perhaps it was the clarity of her presence there, perhaps it was the sense of a long task carried to fulfillment, anyway I felt in my chest a deep upwelling, my nose burned, my eyes prickled, and turning my face away I paid Olivia the dark homage of my tears.

I ask myself: was there a flaw, a little fatal flaw? Was there at the very outset an error in conception or construction that by the operation of unalterable laws was bound to bring my work to a disastrous end? Without arrogance I think I may answer: No. Oh, there may have been some very minor lapse here or there, some lack of precise imagining that spoke of Olivia’s kinship with all that is unshaped and unborn, but the vividness, the clarity, of her being was beyond all doubt. Indeed I would argue that insofar as our existence is confirmed or strengthened by our presence in a mind outside our own, her existence was far richer than that of the beings we call human. For we are imagined carelessly and in patches, you and I, we’re ghosts and phantoms all, fading away and reappearing at the whim of amateur imaginers, whereas Olivia — well, Olivia was imagined with an artist’s passionate exactitude. And just as the enticing vividness of a painting or statue derives in part from the intensity of our attention, so the creature I had pressed forth night after night from the malleable stuff of my imagination flourished by virtue of the accumulated acts of attention that I had lavished upon her. Then why, at the very moment of my triumph, did I feel a twist of anxiety?

For I was anxious, I won’t deny it. Slowly, night after night, I had brought my creature into being, and in the consuming passion of my task I hadn’t given much thought to exactly what was to become of her. The artist sells his painting, or leans the unsold canvas solidly against the unyielding wall. The writer multiplies his creatures in editions of many thousands, or perhaps places his heavy typescript, bound in black, in the bottom drawer of his desk where in its slowly spun cocoon of dust it grows secret rainbow wings as it prepares to burst forth into the light of posterity’s dazzling day. But what of those who summon into existence a being of the third realm? Aye, what of us? Do you think it’s easy for us, we solitary ones, we attic dwellers and noontime dreamers, with the mark of midnight on our brow? In the nights that followed it seemed to me that Olivia looked at me with a questioning gaze. Of course she didn’t just stand there always. I liked to send her off on little journeys into the midnight streets of my town, where she could walk unnoticed and undisturbed. But it was precisely these early wanderings that impressed on me a certain aimlessness in her way of life, and led me to construct for her a wondrous dwelling.

I chose the stretch of woodland at the north end of town beyond the park and the new shopping center. There, drawing on my architectural studies of a year ago, I built a many-roomed mansion in the full mad flower of late-nineteenth-century eclecticism, complete with towers and cross gables, Gothic windows with heavy drip-moldings, Italianate scrolled brackets under the projecting eaves. I laid the grounds with an overgrown English garden containing meandering paths, dim pools, and moldering statues. The images came with surprising swiftness, as if I had already created them and were now simply permitting them to realize their nature. The extravagance of it all struck me as peculiarly suitable for Olivia. For wasn’t it expressive of a secret extravagance in her nature that I had suspected from the beginning, despite her air of detachment? In any case Olivia now had a home to go to when she wasn’t with me or wandering alone through the streets of the town. She lived there with her handsome but solitary father who designed intricate electronic equipment and had a passion for chess problems, classic military battles, and cryptic crossword puzzles, and her rather dim mother who played the piano and was rumored to rise at noon. There was also a sickly grandmother with uncombed white hair who visited for months at a time and rarely left her room. They had a housekeeper, a Mrs. Nelson, who came every Thursday. In addition to her bedroom on the second floor, Olivia had a tower room all to herself, where she liked to read. No one paid much attention to Olivia, who came and went as she pleased, took occasional part-time jobs that she always quit within two weeks, read long Russian novels while drinking tea with honey, and appeared to be waiting for something.

At this period I was leading an extremely solitary life. I stayed up all night, went to bed at six or seven in the morning, and slept until three in the afternoon. I avoided my parents as much as possible and began eating dinner alone in the kitchen long after they were through. These strategies, developed at first to enable me to proceed undisturbed with my various projects, now permitted me to spend a great deal of time with Olivia. She was particularly vivid to me after eleven o’clock, when my parents went to bed and the whole summer night lay open before us. I would imagine her opening the front screen door and the front wooden door, making her way through the moonlit living room past the mahogany bookcase, past the round mahogany table with the old chain-pull lamp…Or I would creep down the attic stairs and down the carpeted stairs and through the moonlit living room into the warm dark-blue summer night. Olivia would be waiting for me. I would see her sitting in the front yard against a fencepost that divided her face into moonlight and shadow, or perhaps waiting around a corner under a sugar maple. And we would set off on a long, detailed, scrupulously imagined walk.

All streets pleased us: the ranch house neighborhood with its rows of identical basketball posts that cast long precise shadows ending in parallelograms, the rural lanes shaded by tall sycamores and Norway maples, the small center of town with its red and yellow window displays: a basket of cheeses wrapped in bright green cellophane, a luminous arrangement of volley-balls and gleaming tennis rackets and exercise bikes, a watch rising and falling in a glass of water, a mannequin with tight black curls, yellow bikini, and silver sunglasses. Olivia studied these displays avidly. She liked to seek out some incongruous detail, like the white plastic spoon resting on the shiny black seat of an exercise bike. She always waited till the last moment before ducking into doorways at the approach of car lights, a habit that made me uneasy; my uneasiness made her impatient. I was calmer on dark rural roads in the north part of town, where crickets shrilled in the long spaces of dark between the light-pools of solitary streetlights. It was understood between us that I was in love with Olivia and that she did not love anyone.

One hot evening as I lay on my bed in the dark and awaited the adventures of the night, I heard a faintly creaking footstep on the attic stairs. I sat up instantly. It was much too early for Olivia, who at that very moment was brushing her hair on the other side of town with a tortoiseshell hairbrush that had recently sprung into existence. The hairbrush bothered me. I didn’t like things springing into existence, but there it was and I couldn’t get rid of it. Another footstep sounded. It was unheard of for my mother or father to intrude on my privacy. After a pause there was another footstep higher up, and in this intermittent and ghostly manner the footsteps ascended, sometimes creaking and sometimes failing to creak, as if the climber were fading in and out of existence. As I imagined the foot rising to the topmost stair in preparation for entering the cold part of the attic, there was a startling knock on the door. “Come in!” I half shouted. The door stuck in the jamb, hesitated, and flew open.

Framed by attic light, my shadowy father loomed in the doorway. He was smoking his curved pipe and wearing his robe and slippers. The room was dark except for the light coming from the open door, and as my father hesitated I said, “I wasn’t asleep, just resting. You can turn on the—”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said dryly, shuffling forward in the half-dark and stepping over books standing in knee-high piles on the ragged rug. A pile of books toppled softly but my father kept coming.

“I see you’re working,” he remarked. “No, don’t get up, I’ll be only a minute. There?” He pointed with his pipe at the shadowy armchair wedged into a corner near the head of the bed. He sat down heavily, removed his pipe, and looked down at the bowl. I could hear him breathing heavily from his climb. “I’m afraid what I have to say is drearily predictable.” He thrust the pipe into his mouth and sucked rapidly, covering and uncovering the bowl with two fingers. “Terrible draw. You wouldn’t happen to have a pipe cleaner. Never mind.” He removed the pipe from his mouth, brought it close to his eye, and lowered it to his knee. “Trite scene, the elderly father admonishing his wayward son. However. I want you to come to a definite decision about your future. I have no objection to supporting your”—here he made a fluttering motion with one hand—“curious way of life, but I cannot do so indefinitely. I understand of course that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy. I certainly hope so. But it isn’t so much my philosophy I’m thinking of as my bankbook. You don’t happen to have a match. Deuce take it. Never mind. Your mother and I are in agreement, a remarkable fact in itself and one worth pondering. Sooner or later you’re going to have to make your own way in the world and I suggest you give the matter some serious thought. Fortunately for you, my pipe has gone out. Bear in mind that this interview is as disagreeable to me as it is to you. It is, however, over. Oof, these old bones. No no, please. Sit still. I prefer to be thought of as a ghost. Well then, Rob. Have a profitable evening, or should I say morning. Life is — well, yes: life. Night.”

Slowly he shuffled from the room, stepping with exaggerated care over bookpiles and strewn underwear. In the light of the doorway he looked massive and wild. A thick ruff of iron-gray hair circled his skull. I listened to his footsteps creaking intermittently down the attic stairs.

Now this was a triply unwelcome intrusion. In the first place, I had been looking forward eagerly to my night of roaming with Olivia, and my attention was now scattered. In the second place, I had carefully put aside the tedious consideration of my ludicrous future. And in the third place, I hadn’t been paying much attention to my aging father, whose sudden appearance struck me with all the force of a haunting. He had been more or less reasonable with me, in his ironic way — a brilliant maneuver, for it had undermined my capacity to feel indignation.

That night Olivia was waiting for me in one of the Scotch pines in the side yard. She climbed down, shaking the branches, and brushed the needles from her blouse and skirt. Olivia was like that: despite her quietness, her air of remoteness, she had bursts of mischievous gaiety. “This is for you, Robert,” she said, and handed me a pinecone. I was unused to her voice, which struck me as a little ghostly. “And this is for me.” She thrust a pinecone in her hair. “Tonight I’d like to go to — oh, Paris. Why don’t we go to Paris? That way.” She pointed down the road. Her playful mood unnerved me, and fevered me too, for she had more dash and daring than I; that night we wandered farther than ever before, beyond the parkway at the north end of town, and returned only when the streetlamps grew pale against the graying of the sky.

Am I understood? Am I? To be with Olivia was for me a serene exhilaration, a fierce peacefulness. Our intimacy was that which only a creator and creature can know. Unable to imagine my life without her, I began to wait for her each night with a harsh, a hectic impatience that only her appearance could soothe away.

Sometimes an uneasiness came over me. Lying on my bed with one arm bent behind my neck, I would stare at my dark piles of books, my desolate desk, my disastrous life. Then when I pushed aside the blinds, the lustrous moon in the dark blue summer night would turn to cigarette ash, the velvety night sky would be the color of bruises and decay, my trafficking in forbidden creations would be a knifeblade twisting in my temple: and as if nourished by hopelessness, invigorated by despair, all the more fervently Olivia and I would hurl ourselves into the pathways of the unchanging summer night. Have I discussed my headaches?

By headache I do not mean the sharp pain at the side or back of the head, or perhaps behind an eye, the banal consequence of conventional stress. No, I have in mind the headache that is a band of metal tightening around the bones of the skull. I have in mind the inner blossom of fire, leaving behind charred and smoking places. And let us not forget the ratlike nibbling headache that gnaws its way slowly through the soft white sweet matter of the brain until it presses its furred back against the inside of the cranium, nor the fabulous winged headache with brilliant red and green feathers and gold-black claws that clutch and squeeze while the heavy wings beat faster and faster, nor the many-branched headache, the thornbush headache that swells and swells to fill the entire skull, pushing its glistening thorns against the soft backs of the eyes until the branches burst through the bloody eye sockets — such are the headaches that must be distinguished from those others, for these are creation’s dark sisters, shadows of the brilliant dream. Shall we continue?

One night Olivia was lingering in town before a display of soup cans in a variety-store window that glowed now red, now green, now red, now green, to the rhythm of a desperately bored stoplight. My headache glowed now red, now green, and as I urged her to come away, please come away, away from all this, I was startled to see a figure emerge from a nearby doorway and approach us. This had never happened before and I felt a constriction in my chest as if some vital organ were being squeezed by a malign hand. Olivia turned without surprise. She introduced us. I disliked him immediately, but really, dislike is too gentle a term for that inner quivering, that intimate raw red tickle of revulsion as if all one’s nerve endings were trembling in the stream of an unwholesome effluence. This Orville — Orville! — came smiling up to us. I saw at once that it was a mocking smile. The very set of his slouched shoulders was insolent. “What a pleasant surprise,” he said, with deliberate falseness. He was tall and thin and paper-pale, and would have been gaunt were it not for a disturbing fleshiness about him: plumpish soft hands, a softness about his chin, even a little potbelly that pressed through his shirt. He wore faded bluejeans and old running shoes and a soiled white dress-shirt. He reminded me of a soft white tuber growing secretly in moist soil. “Olivia has told me so much about you,” he continued. “Actually she’s never mentioned you. What did you say your name was? Harold?”

“We were just going,” I remarked.

“Then I’ll join you,” he said and walked alongside Olivia, standing too close to her. “Ah, the night! What would we do without it? It’s a wonderful invention. Youth, clair de lune, dreamlike distortion, spiritual transfiguration — even death. They start you off with ‘Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star’ and before you know it you’re crooning ‘O sink hernieder, Nacht der Liebe!’ Match?” He reached into his shirt pocket and drew out half a cigarette.

He was, Olivia informed me when he had left (abruptly, with mocking bow), the son of a friend of a friend of her mother’s. He had driven his mother and her friend to Olivia’s mother’s house one night, in order to have use of the family car, and on his return he had seen Olivia on the stairs. “Nice painting,” he had remarked, jerking his thumb at her. “Is it an original?” Since then he had shown up a few times, asking for Olivia; she had spoken to him once, indifferently. This brief, unsatisfactory history, the episode of our meeting, his disagreeable name, in fact everything about him filled me with irritable unease. My instinctive, brutal revulsion wasn’t simply a response to his physical person, his mockery, his air of knowing some unsavory secret he was itching to reveal, his whole spiritual bag of tricks, but to something else that I found difficult to define but that revealed itself more clearly on later occasions.

Later occasions, did I say? Yes, later occasions — there were plenty of those. Night after night he would pop out at us from behind some maple trunk or lamppost and join us in our wanderings. Under the pressure of his presence the nights changed shape, became sadly deformed. Orville was by nature an intruder, a violator, and it showed in his slightest gestures: he leaped up to rip down handfuls of maple leaves, leaned over moonlit fences to break off flowers that he sniffed and tossed away. One night he pointed to the open door of an attached garage and began slinking along the driveway, beckoning. I was outraged but saw that Olivia wanted to follow. We crept into the dark garage and made our way along a narrow path between a station wagon on one side and on the other a pair of garbage cans, a basket of lawn tools, two bicycles, a hot-water heater wrapped in insulation. The black inner door opened to a moonlit porch. Orville sat on a chaise longue and smoked a cigarette, leaving the smoking butt in a bouquet of ceramic flowers. I saw that he was bent on goading me and in response I assumed an expression of intense boredom. Leaping suddenly to his feet he opened the porch door and beckoned us into the moonlit back yard. He led us under a taut badminton net, past a wicker armchair on which a badminton birdie lay on its side, and through a tall hedge into another back yard, where a yellow toy dump-truck sat beside a gardening glove, and then along a driveway bordered with zinnias until we came out on a leafy street.

“Night’s dreamlike freedom,” Orville said, sweeping out an arm. “Existence as dream. Eh, Robert? Dare me to climb that roof over there and sit smoking on the chimney. Dare me to enter that window and bring back a bunch of grapes from the icebox. No? And yet, on such a night, when the moon resembles a beautiful head of cauliflower, one feels, ho hum, that anything might happen. Here, watch this. See that pole?” He lowered his head and began running hard toward a nearby telephone pole. “Stop!” Olivia cried, but he kept plunging forward. At the last moment I snapped my head away. When I turned I saw the moonlit telephone pole. Its long shadow stretched across a neatly trimmed lawn, stood up against the bright white side of a house, bent across the pale roof. Orville, with mocking smile, stepped out from behind the pole. He placed a hand on his stomach and bowed. I glanced at Olivia, who was looking down at her hands.

Minor intrusions, you say, trivial violations; and yet they oppressed me. Those melodramatic entrances, those mocking innuendos, those little monologues on the dreamlike nature of existence — and once, removing half a cigarette from his pocket, he placed it on his thumbnail and said, “Here’s an interesting trick.” He flipped the cigarette into the blue darkness, shaded his eyes, and cupped an ear, listening intently. At last he turned up his palms with a look of exaggerated bewilderment. “Vanished,” he said. “Kaput. An illusion — like life itself, one is tempted to add.” Bitterly I resented his influence over Olivia. True, she treated him with indifference, even contempt, yet I noticed that she accepted his presence as if it were as natural as the night itself. He for his part had a subtly disturbing effect on her, for in his presence she seemed to me less vital, less richly particular, as if her full nature were being constricted by his mockery into a faded, wooden version of itself.

As for me, I could not understand his poisonous presence each night. Whatever route I took, however hard I tried, sooner or later he would step out to greet us with a look of false surprise; and a nervousness came over me as I tried to account for him, tried to interpret his obscure hints.

“Consider what a dreamlike existence I lead,” he said one night, stepping out suddenly from behind a hollyhock and joining us as we walked. “Today I rose at noon, breakfasted at one, at two considered how I might earn a living without the necessity of leaving my room, opened a novel at three, a moment later raised my eyes to discover that romantic night had fallen — and here I am, a shadow among shadows, gliding beneath the ridiculously round moon, which reminds me of a Necco wafer. The other day my mother asked me what I was going to do with my wife. She said wife, not life, but didn’t notice the slip because she was thinking about something else at the time and because I’m practically a figment of her imagination anyway. Those houses look like candy. And look at this! Someone seems to have been extremely careless.” Bending over abruptly, he began to roll up a leg of his narrow jeans. At the top of his running shoe began a white sock and at the top of the sock I saw or seemed to see nothing — emptiness — nothing at all. “Stop that!” I said angrily. Orville, grinning up at me, rolled down his pant leg. “A trick of all-transforming night,” he said, looking at me upside down. Olivia stood with averted eyes. I remember the blackness of her lashes against her brilliant white skin.

In the nights that followed I began to sense a remoteness in Olivia. She seemed a little tired, a little listless; it was as if she had fewer gestures at her command. She avoided my eyes. Was she, even then, preparing her departure? Scrupulously I planned intricate night-wanderings in little-known parts of town, but always I had the feeling that her inner attention was elsewhere; and from behind every house corner, from behind every fir tree and hydrangea bush, I waited for that fiend Orville to appear. One night Olivia held both elbows and gave a little shiver. “Summer’s almost over,” she said. Her words pierced me like a farewell; I noticed it was cool. “Curtain,” Orville said, and gave a sneering bow.

But the nights grew hot again. As if to oblige me, Orville caught a cold and took to his bed. We resumed our carefree wandering, Olivia and I, through the summer-lovely streets, past the sprinklers on the lawns of ranch houses, under the thruway overpass, along rural lanes lined by sycamores and low stone walls; and all was happy, all was well; only sometimes I would raise my head and look about in confusion, as if I had lost track of something; and a pain, a little pain, began in the back of one eye, beating with the rhythm of my heartbeat.

“Oh Robert,” my father said one evening as I ate alone in the kitchen. The swinging door shut behind him; the breeze of its closing touched my face. “About our little talk.” He stood with his hands clasped behind his back. “Have you made up your mind? Interesting expression: to make up your mind. As if the mind were an unmade bed.”

“I’m not feeling well,” I said, scraping back my chair.

Late one night when I was feeling tired, terribly tired, I waited longer than usual before setting forth on my night journey. It was after midnight. Outside I waited impatiently for Olivia. She had not been looking well lately. I searched the yard, walked around the block, set off hesitantly and returned. It was a windy night, nervous gray-blue clouds rushed across the sky, covering and uncovering the moon. I climbed the two staircases to my attic room, descended suddenly and waited outside, returned to my room. There I sat down at my desk for no particular reason and immediately stood up and joined myself on the bed. Through the slightly raised window I heard a soft riot of crickets and a faint rustle or susurration that puzzled me before I suddenly solved it: the dim rush of trucks on the distant thruway. I imagined the austere, heavy-shouldered tribe of truckdrivers crossing and crisscrossing the night, stopping at islands of yellow light in the darkness to sit on gleaming red stools and loop their fingers in the handles of heavy, thick-edged cups. The stools creaked under the truckdrivers and mingled with the chirr of crickets and the distant rustle of trucks. On the attic steps I heard a faint creaking. Slowly her footsteps ascended. I saw the series of comic mishaps — I returning to my room, she looking for me in vain before going off, I descending to look for her in vain — and as I waited for the door to open I remembered the night when I had finished my work and Olivia stood resting one hand on my desk and staring at the window. What had she been thinking? I felt a burst of tenderness and unease, my head was beating like a drum, suddenly the door opened with a cracking sound.

Slouched and slack, with a look of exaggerated innocence, flourishing an unlit cigarette, he slinked his way forward over the black bookpiles, the strewn underwear, the stray shoes and slippers lying on their sides. “Match?” he said, throwing himself into my reading chair and hooking a leg over the arm.

“Where is she?” I demanded.

“Where she’s always been.” He gave a soft snort of laughter and looked about. “Nice setup you’ve got here. Not my style exactly, but then, what is. Match?”

“Look, I’m not feeling well. What do you want?”

“But I’ve just told you. Oh: here’s one. A pause as the villain of the piece strikes a match. In the sudden spurt of the hellish match-flame his pale satanic features — which reminds me, Robert, that line of yours was awful. ‘Look, I’m not feeling well. What do you want?’ Very third-rate stuff. Have you noticed that whenever people feel deeply they speak in cliches? I love you. Do you love me? Don’t leave me. Don’t. The real justification for cynicism is that it improves one’s style. She asked me to bring you this.”

He reached into his shirt pocket and removed a folded envelope. I snatched it from him and removed a folded piece of paper. I shook it open and saw at the top of the page the words Dear Robert. The page itself was blank.

“Is this some sort of joke?” I said angrily.

“Now now, don’t lose your temper, Robert. Artists should never lose control. I hope you’re not losing control, Robert. Not losing control, are you? You know, you don’t understand the first thing about her, you don’t even believe in her, no one is called Olivia, and besides, what’s the point of it all? It’s hopeless, pal. Might as well throw in the towel. Time to hang up your tights, buster. You’re all washed up. It’s all over, bub. This is it.”

He reached into his pants pocket and removed a small black gun. He pointed it at me and his face knotted in rage. I threw up an arm. A stream of water shot past my cheek at the window curtain. He gave a gulp of unpleasant laughter.

I looked at him with contempt.

“But then, Robert, how does that line go? I forget.” He laid a long finger along his cheek and frowned in thought. “Oh, I have it. We are such stuff and nonsense as dreams are made of. And what about me? Poor li’l ol’ me? Sprung up out of god knows where, ill conceived, hastily patched together, a few threadbare gestures — difficult to be civilized, all things considered, under the circumstances. You really might have given it more thought.”

“I don’t know what you—”

“Not that I hold it against you, Herendeen old world-shaker. It suits my, my what, well say my sense of ironic detachment, not to mention my um charming cynicism and my attraction to extremes. And so I live out my life at the edge of the plausible. An example to us all. God bless us one and all, and Tiny Tim. Here. Pick a card.”

He produced from a pocket a fistful of cards and held them fanlike before him. On the glossy backs were pictured a young nun kneeling in prayer, her palms pressed together at her throat, her eyes raised yearningly.

“I don’t have to listen to you.”

“Of course not! And yet you do, don’t you. Here. This one?” He held out daintily a card chosen from one end. I snatched it from him with disdain. On the other side was a slightly blurred black-and-white photograph of the same nun standing with her back to the viewer and looking over her shoulder with a smile. Her wimple was down and her long blond hair lay fanned across her back. She was holding up her habit, revealing black high heels, black fishnet stockings, tense black garters, and the round white bottom of one firm buttock.

I swept my hand through his outspread cards. “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” I said. Falling slowly, as if they were dry leaves, the cards floated down to the bed, to the floor, to the arms of the chair, and lay still.

“Very nice, Robert. Very nicely done. A nice effect.” Suddenly he sat upright. “It’s unbearably hot in here. Mind if I take off my head?” Placing his hands on his jaw he began pushing, pushing, his eyes were twisted in anguish—“Stop!” I commanded. He dropped his hands and looked at me with a sly smile.

“Why certainly, Robert. Anything you say.” His expression changed to intense concern. “May I speak frankly? You’re not a well man, Robert. Maybe you ought to — you know, go away for a while.” He sighed. “And now I’m tired. Why is that? Good God!” He glanced at his wrist, which was without a watch. “So late already? By jingo, I hope to heaven she. By Jove, I hope it isn’t too late to.”

“I’m not listening to any more of this crazy—”

“Have it your way, Bob. Hey, what are you—”

I squeezed past the chair, stumbled over a bookpile, scraped against a bookshelf. At the door I looked back at him. “Nighty-night,” he said, wiggling his fingertips, but I was already halfway down the attic stairs, already the screen door was closing behind me.

It was late, a brisk wind blew; now and then in the dark streets the obsidian windows gave off a shine of streetlights. Once I passed a faint yellow glow behind a curtain, where perhaps in a flowered armchair under a brass standing lamp an insomniac in summer pajamas sat reading a thick novel set in Berlin or Morocco. In my anxiety I followed an erratic route: scarcely had I passed the first corner-post of a black front porch when I found myself rounding the final post of a porch two blocks away, no sooner had I passed that porch than I found myself before a luminous window containing tennis rackets and exercise bikes, the edge of the window shaded into a winding lane bordered by tall thistles and tiger lilies, and turning a corner I came to the edge of a dark wood. Olivia’s house was invisible from the road. I made my way along a path of pinecones and oak leaves, stumbling in the dark. Around a bend the house loomed on a rise, all its windows ablaze, its black towers and gables sharply outlined against the stormy sky. A faint sound of music and voices drifted down to me. I passed several cars parked on the side of the unlit path and soon found myself in an overgrown garden. A weathered statue with decayed, pocked breasts and a single arm stood tilted at a dangerous angle; the arm was held out gracefully, and someone had hung a watering can from the thumbless hand. I passed a crumbling fountain, a child’s wagon containing a three-pronged gardening tool and half a tennis ball, an immense bush with heavy black blossoms. A topiary hedge had been cut to resemble a swan, but the swan was badly in need of trimming: it had a ruffled, shaggy look, and here and there long stems poked up, as if the swan were bursting at the seams. There was something hasty and slapdash about this garden, as if it had not been thought out very carefully, small paths branched off in all directions, and following one path I came to a cul de sac that turned out to be the side of the high front porch. Through the balusters that began at the height of my head I saw glowing yellow windows beyond which shadows moved. Holding to the posts I made my way through bushes and flowers to the front of the porch and climbed the stone steps to the front door, which opened suddenly to release a big tawny cat who hesitated before rushing past me into the wilderness of the garden. “Poor kitty,” murmured a woman with eyeglasses who stood holding the inner doorknob and peering into the dark. Without changing the direction of her glance she said, “Please come in, I’m so glad you could come,” and as I stepped past her into the hall she turned to me with a puzzled expression.

“Robert Herendeen,” I said, “and you must be Olivia’s mother.” “Oh no, heavens,” she said, raising a spread hand to the top of her chest, “whatever gave you, oh no, I’m just answering the — you know, the door. May I take your coat, Roger? You don’t seem to have a coat, do you. Are you a friend of—”

“Yes, she’s expecting me.” Through a doorway I saw a crowd of revelers in eye-masks, and brushing past a leaning coat tree and an umbrella stand containing an orange yardstick I entered the room. At a glossy black piano sat a woman in a brilliant green dress and a pink eye-mask, playing barbershop quartet tunes while she leaned forward to peer at a sheet of music held open by a bright yellow Schirmer album of Beethoven sonatas. Three masked and bearded men stood singing with their arms around each other’s shoulders. Masked men and women talked in loud groups, a glass fell on its side and a ruby liquid rushed across a tabletop, a silver-masked woman in bluejeans and a gray sweatshirt threw back her head to laugh and plunged her frizzy long blond hair into a passing tray of drinks. A hand with long mint-green nails appeared in front of me, holding a black mask by its rubber string. I slipped the mask over my eyes and pushed my way through the crowded room toward another doorway, which admitted me to a den or sitting room where revelers sat on couches and armchairs. An elderly woman in white pants handed me a narrow glass on a stem, containing a green liquid. I took a sip and felt a burn in my throat; someone applauded. A tall fellow with a red mask waggled his fingers at me. Was he here, then, too? I found another door and passed into the dim-lit kitchen. On the counter beside an empty dishrack sat a masked woman in a knee-length skirt, her hands tucked under her thighs, one leg swinging slowly back and forth as she talked to someone who sat on the floor in the dark. At the end of the kitchen I opened a door and found myself in a hall. It appeared not to be the front hall, for in one direction I saw a high, closed door and in the other I saw rows of doors leading into darkness. I walked toward the dark, past paneled doors with fluted glass knobs, until the corridor ended at a transverse hall. I turned left. As I proceeded along the almost dark corridor, past closed doors, the black gleam of a mirror, a high-backed narrow chair on which sat a black telephone, I realized that I had only a vague sense of this part of the house, which seemed to extend back and back. Here other hallways began to branch left and right, the doors were of different sizes, through an open arch I saw a room with armchairs and glass-doored bookcases; and as I continued I felt that I was penetrating deeper and deeper into a region where rooms and corridors sprouted in the lush, extravagant dark.

One of the halls ended in a carpeted stairway and I began to climb. On the dark landing I bumped a small table; something rattled glassily and slowly became still. Four more stairs led to an upper hallway, dark except for a weak night-light in the baseboard. At the end of the hall I turned into another hall, where all was black except for a strip of yellow light running along the bottom and up the side of a barely open black door that rested against the jamb. I made my way to the door and stood listening but heard no sound. “Olivia,” I whispered, “are you there?” Slowly I pushed open the paneled door, which revealed a big empty bed with the reading light on. The covers of the bed were turned down and a panda lay under the blanket, holding out stiffly both plump paws. There was a tall mahogany bureau, a desk with a fat typewriter squatting on it, an armchair with its back to me. A standing lamp shone down over the armchair’s left shoulder. Olivia’s black hair at the top of the chair was glossy as licorice. I tiptoed up to her and bent over.

The black wig sat on the head of a big floppy doll propped up on four books. In the doll’s lap was an open copy of Anna Karenina. “Very funny,” I said, looking about sharply. Under the bed-light the panda avoided my stare.

I returned to the hall and made my way into the dark, running my fingertips along the papered walls, the doorjambs, the paneled doors, until I came to a sudden opening in the wall. A short corridor led to a many-paned window. Through the panes I saw buttery yellow light from a lower window spilling onto ragged bushes. Beyond the bushes a dark wooden swing dangled above the ground, its fallen rope twisted in the grass. Black tree-branches crossed my window and through them I saw a dark blue sky with rushing blue-gray clouds. Short flights of stairs began at my left and right. I chose a flight and made my way along a hall that was intersected by another hall, and it seemed to me that I was going to spend the rest of my life wandering the prolific hallways of that always branching house, when I came to a door that opened onto a flight of wooden steps.

I turned on a switch that illuminated a faint amber night-light and began to climb. The walls were studs separated by vertical, rippling strips of insulation from which pink twists of fibers escaped at the sides. On a nail hung a leather glove with burst fingertips. At the top of the stairs I came to a crude wooden door fastened by a hook. I unlatched the hook and stepped over the steep doorsill into a pile of wood shavings at the bottom of a narrow stairway. Four steps led to a landing, four more steps to another, four steps to a third landing, and in this manner the stairway turned at landing after landing until it abandoned all pretense and became a rickety circular stairway with a creaking rail. My thighs ached, my breath came sharp, far away I heard the dim sound of a piano, and all at once I came to a low door no higher than my neck. I turned the knob and the door opened easily.

“So there you are,” I said and bowed my way beneath the low lintel into the tower room.

Six of the eight walls were lined with bookshelves from top to bottom. The seventh wall contained a casement window, beneath which sat a reading chair; against the eighth wall stood a dressing table with a large oval mirror. Olivia sat at the dressing table with her back to me and her mirrored face looking directly at me. A green mask covered her eyes. She wore a black dress, black stockings, a pearl necklace, and a pink-and-green party hat. She was leaning forward and appeared to be studying her face in the mirror, which reflected part of the open door, my hand on the knob, and part of my shirt and pants. Still holding the door I bent over to see myself in the mirror, startled at the black mask over my eyes, which I had forgotten.

“You’re just in time,” Olivia said, reaching behind her neck to unclasp the pearl necklace. On the dressing table stood an open jewelbox, a row of faceted glass vials, and a bald wig stand that disturbed me for some reason.

“Are you going to the party?”

“I’ve already been.” She placed the necklace in the blue velvet tray of the jewelbox and leaned forward again. The black window reflected a wall of books. I closed the door behind me and stood uneasily in the large octagonal room. Olivia reached through an eye-slit of her mask, removed something small and dark, and placed it carefully on the dressing table. As she reached into the other eye-slit I took a step forward and saw her remove a pair of false eyelashes, which she placed beside the first pair. A feeling of anxiety came over me and I said, “Olivia, let’s leave this place, let’s go for a walk, it’s hard to breathe in here, Olivia.” And indeed I felt that something wrong was happening, that things were beginning to get out of hand. “Don’t be absurd,” Olivia said, slipping off her long blood-red fingernails one by one and placing all ten of them side by side on the dressing table, where they resembled the visible tips of invisible hands. Slowly she removed a glittering earring hidden by her hair. She placed the second earring beside the first in the velvety jewelbox. Then she reached behind her neck to unclasp a glossy black cluster of hanging hair. She held it up for a moment, examining it with her head tipped to one side before laying it on the table. It looked like a black squirrel. Then she swung halfway around in her chair, drew her silky black dress up to her thighs, and unclasped her garters one by one. Swiftly she rolled down each black stocking in turn, and gave them a little kick. “There,” she said, wriggling her toes, “that’s a relief!” In the lamplight her bare legs looked glossy and smooth. She reached an arm behind her neck. With a sharp ripping sound she pulled a black zipper partway down. She reached her other arm behind her back and pulled the zipper down to her waist. “Olivia,” I said. She gave a little yawn, stretched out her arms, and looked vaguely about. She slipped off her pink-and-green party hat and placed it next to the wig stand. She slipped off a chain bracelet and dropped it on the table with a sharp little rattle. She slipped off her watch, slipped off a glittering ring, and raising her hands to the sides of her head she slipped off her hair and mask, placing them carefully over the wig stand.

The top of her head was smooth and blank. In the mirror I saw her faded eyes, her flat, painted eyebrows. Her nose was little and hard. With a sigh she stood up. Wearily she drew the black dress over her head, revealing a black half-slip and a black bra. “Olivia,” I said, “that’s enough now, enough, enough now,” and somewhere I heard a footstep creaking on a stair. “Olivia,” I said, but already she was removing her half-slip, already she was stepping out of her underpants, unhooking her black bra. Her breasts were smooth and flattish and without nipples. Wearily she slipped out of her cluster of pubic curls, leaving herself smooth and hard. “Tn,” she said, and stood stiffly there. “What,” I said, “what did you say.” Her limbs shimmered in the lamplight. One arm was held out as if to be offered to someone crossing the street. The masked wig stand looked at me.

“Olivia?” I said, reaching out a hand but not moving. I felt that if only I could return to the meandering hallways then perhaps I might begin all over again, but behind me I heard a clattering, the door began to shake, all at once it sprang open.

Huffing and puffing, taking deep exaggerated breaths, holding one hand over his chest, Orville entered. “So there”—pause for gasping—“you”—pause for gasping—“are!” His running shoes were covered with wood shavings. He strode over to Olivia, picked her up by the elbows, and laid her against the reading chair like an old lamp. And indeed she had begun to resemble an old standing lamp, with a dull brass base and three light sockets with burned-out bulbs. “That’s all, then,” he said. “We won’t be needing this anymore.” He went over to the table and removed the oval mirror, leaning it against a wall of books. He went to the casement window and slipped off one of the hinged frames. A brisk wind blew into the room, fluttering the hair of the wig stand, knocking over a glass vial. Orville laid the hinged frame against the mirror. He looked about, strode up to a wall, and began pushing against the shelves. The walls began to move back and forth, I could feel the tower trembling. “Stop that!” I said. In rage he turned to me and stamped his foot, which plunged through the floor. Splinters flew; puffs of dust rose up. “I hope you’re satisfied!” he cried. He looked at me with hatred as I turned to the door. It seemed to have grown smaller — I could barely squeeze my way through.

I hurried down the turning wooden stairs, which seemed to be swaying under my footsteps. Above me I heard sounds as of ripping and muffled thumping. I came to a landing, I flung myself down the steps to another landing — and as I descended, the landings seemed to rise faster and faster to meet me. I stepped into a pile of shavings, climbed over a threshold that came up to my knees, clattered down a flimsy flight of splintery steps, emerged in a hall. As I hurried along I could hear bits of plaster falling with the delicate sound of spilled sugar. Other hallways branched from the hall, and I must have made a wrong turn somehow, for I could not find the carpeted stairway going down. Ahead of me in the darkness I saw a line of light under a door. I felt a sudden need to say farewell to her room, and when I came up to it I pushed lightly against the door. It swung briskly inward and clattered against the wall. In a big bed an old woman with streaming white hair stared at me over the tops of her reading glasses. Her mouth was large and brightly lipsticked. Her hand gripped the top of her nightdress and her mouth was opening wider and wider as I shut the door and rushed on. The floor was trembling slightly, bits of plaster struck my arms, and I noticed that the corridor was lined with pieces of furniture: a small table, a wing chair, a grandfather clock. The furniture began to collect more thickly and jut into the hall, so that it was necessary for me to squeeze between sharp edges and climb over the arms of old stuffed chairs, as in certain dreams, terrible dreams, where you — Somewhere I heard a sound of shattering glass. I was wondering whether to turn back when the hall ended in a small door no higher than my knees. I knelt down and tried to peer through the tiny keyhole, then pushed the door open and scraped my way through.

I found myself in what appeared to be a low storage space. My hand pressed into something soft and rubbery that gave a wheezing squeak. I snatched my hand away and brushed against a shape that began to fall over, giving a soft “Waaa.” Something poked up before me and I felt the cold top of a ladder, rising through a trap door. I swung my leg through the opening and began to climb down. Cloth rose up on all sides of me, it was as though I were sinking helplessly into a morass of thick, yielding folds — and half drowning in that mass of musty perfumed dresses I made my way down to the floor of a closet. There I thrust my way through clutching sleeves and buckles to a door that opened onto a hall.

In the branching corridors I turned left and right while plaster fell from the trembling walls. Behind me a picture struck the floor sharply, like the blade of a guillotine. I came to a door, pulled it open, and entered the dark kitchen. In the black dishrack a pointed black party hat sat upside down in the silverware box. I hurried through a door and found myself in the lamplit room of couches and armchairs, deserted except for a tired-looking woman with gray hair pulled back tight who was picking up teacups and glasses. Without looking up at me, she handed me a small wooden bowl containing a few peanut halves lying among glistening brown skins. I carried the bowl into the next room. Everyone had left, the room was nearly dark. Black furniture loomed against the night-blue windows. On the dark-gleaming piano bench I placed the bowl beside an abandoned mask. I tore off my mask and knocked my leg against a sharp corner as I hurried through the room and out into the front hall. Heavy pieces of plaster were falling, I could feel a fine dust sifting down. Somewhere above I heard a loud snap or crack. Before me the coat tree began to fall slowly, dreamily, landing with a muffled thud among its coats. I stepped over it, fumbled at the front door, and ran out onto the porch. One of the thick corner-posts appeared to be buckling. I ran down the stone steps onto a flagstone path, where I leaped over something that might have been a cat, and as I escaped from the collapsing house into the ruined garden, which was already wavering and dissolving under a rushing sky, it seemed to me that if only I could remain calm remain calm remain calm then I might be able to imagine what would happen to me next.