Voices in the Night: Stories

ELSEWHERE

That summer a restlessness came over our town. You could feel it on Main Street, you could feel it at the beach. In the early mornings we’d step from our front doors and head for the paper wrapped in its rubber band at the end of the walk — and in that warm, inviting air we’d stop suddenly, as if in confusion. At work we stared out of windows. At home we sat down, stood up, walked into other rooms. We planned long weekend excursions that never materialized, flung ourselves into complex diets that we forgot the next day, spoke eagerly of changing our habits, our jobs, our lives. Husbands in baseball caps and cargo shorts, pushing power mowers and dreaming of distant mountains, drifted absentmindedly across driveways into neighboring yards, where they looked around in surprise. On the green lawns of summer, you could see the wives in gardening gloves and wide-brimmed hats, kneeling on cushions beside rows of marigolds and azaleas. As they raised their three-pronged weeders, they would sometimes pause for a moment and glance into the next yard. They would look up at the familiar windows at the back of a neighbor’s house, at the roof shingles trembling with sunlight, over the top of the roof into the startling blue sky, which seemed to be calling them to come away, come away.

Even the young people of our town seemed infected by unease. Home from school, teenagers in T-shirts and ripped jeans threw themselves down on the family couch with an arm over their eyes. Seconds later they sprang up as if in the grip of a violent passion, then fell back with a shuddering yawn. On burning Saturday afternoons at the public beach, you could see the children crouching down on the hard wet sand at the water’s edge. There they began building fanatically detailed castles, with turrets and castellations and arrow slits for crossbows, pausing only to look up as a yellow helicopter flew high above the water. When they looked back down, they had lost interest forever.

In the hot nights we’d sit on our screened back porches, lit by dim lanterns, and listen to the crickets growing louder and louder, as if they were always coming closer, and behind them or through them we could hear a deeper sound, like a distant waterfall: the steady roll of trucks on the thruway, rushing away in opposite directions.

What was it that we wanted? We were doing all right, on the whole, we were happy enough, as things go. Oh, we had our worries, we woke in the dark with thoughts of money and death, but our neighborhoods were safe, no one died of hunger in our town, we counted our blessings and knew we’d been spared the worst. We’d looked forward to summer the way we always did — season of vacations, season of departures from the usual flow of things — but this time there was something left over, as if we’d stretched out our arms wider than the world. Had we expected too much of summer? That blue sky, that yellow sun…Never a blue sun! Nowhere a green sky! Sometimes we had the sense that we were waiting for something, a hint, a sign — waiting for a direction in which we could pour our terrible energy.

The first incident occurred toward the middle of June, at about 10:30 at night, in the home of Amy Banks, a sixteen-year-old high-school junior. Her parents, Dr. Richard Banks, a well-known orthodontist with a flourishing practice on East Broad Street, and Melinda Banks, a social worker at the new community center, were upstairs in their bedroom. Amy had been sitting in the family room, watching TV with the sound off and talking to a girlfriend on her cherry-red cell phone. She said good night, snapped the cell shut, and reached for the remote. At that moment she became aware of a motion in the dark corner of the room between the TV and the window. From the window a pair of light curtains hung down past the sill. Amy thought at first that a breeze might have stirred a curtain, even though the room was warm and the window was closed. As she began to get up from the couch, where she’d been sitting back against two pillows with her legs tucked under her, she was again aware of a motion in the corner, which this time, she said, was a “stirring,” though not of the curtains. She saw nothing distinct, nothing at all.

Now a fear seized her. At the same time she was uncertain what she’d seen and told herself not to cry out and wake her father, who went to bed early. The stirring continued, without a sound. Just as Amy was about to run from the room, everything returned to normal: the corner was still, the TV cord lay against the baseboard, a woman on the screen sat in her car and silently pounded the heels of both hands against the steering wheel, the light from the kitchen reached across the arm of the reading chair and touched the edge of the lamp table. Amy stood up. She took two deep breaths and walked over to the corner. There she examined the floor, the baseboard, and the back of the TV. She pulled aside both curtains. She raised and lowered the window shade, felt the wall, looked all around. She turned off the TV and went up to bed.

The next night, shortly after ten o’clock, something stirred in the first-floor bedroom of Barbara Scirillo, a high school senior who lived three blocks away from Amy Banks and shared a French class with her. Barbara screamed. Her father, James Scirillo, a physics teacher and a member of the school board, called the police. No trace of an intruder was found. Barbara said she’d been changing into her pajamas and watching the computer screen when she felt something or someone move in the room. She saw nothing, no one. She could provide no further details.

Our local paper, the Daily Echo, reported the Scirillo incident on the second page, where Amy Banks’s father came across it over breakfast. He put down his coffee cup, shook the paper into shape, and read the piece aloud to his wife and daughter. When Amy then described her own weird adventure, Dr. Banks called the police. The Echo gave a full account the next day.

Now we were all on the alert for an intruder, possibly a peeping Tom, though we reminded ourselves that the details were sketchy, the observers impressionable. No doubt the incidents would soon have been forgotten, if it hadn’t been for a sudden rash of “sightings,” as they came to be called. The victims — or sighters — were mostly junior-high and high-school girls, who reported suspicious movements at night in the corners of living rooms, bedrooms, and darkened hallways. But they weren’t the only ones who saw things. A woman in her late thirties reported a stirring in her garage at dusk, several young mothers reported incidents of apparent intrusion, and John Czuzak, a retired policeman, claimed that one night when he entered his kitchen from the TV room he saw something move near the refrigerator, though he couldn’t say what it was that moved or even what the motion was like, other than “a kind of ripple.”

As the incidents spread across our town, creeping into the bedrooms of corporate lawyers and third-grade teachers and drill-press operators who worked at the machine shop out on Cortland Avenue, people began to propose theories to account for what was happening. Of these the Peeping Tom and the Prankster Theories were the most widely believed. The police warned us to lock our doors and windows at night and report any sign of unusual behavior in our neighborhoods. Some of us wondered whether there might be a physical explanation — maybe the ripples were effects of light produced by passing cars, or the results of air condensing because of a sudden temperature change.

These early guesses quickly gave way to more elaborate conjectures. The incidents, some said, were signs of a collective delusion bred by the boredom of summer — the sightings passed from girl to girl like an infection and then to anyone with a hungry imagination. We were trying to decide whether it pleased us or bothered us to think of the sightings as imaginary when a bolder theory appeared. The article was printed in the Opinions section of the Daily Echo and signed “A Friend of Truth.” In it the writer argued that the mysterious incidents were nothing less than manifestations of the invisible world — eruptions of the immaterial into our realm of matter. This argument, which many of us found irritating or laughable, was taken up, debated, condemned, and embellished, until in a late version it served as the founding principle of a group that called itself the New Believers. Members proposed that the visible world contains rents or fissures through which the invisible world shows itself. The “manifestations” were said to indicate those places of rupture.

Many of us who resisted these explanations found them more troubling than the incidents they sought to illuminate, for in their extremity, in their eagerness to embrace an unseen world, they seemed to us a sign of the very discontent that burned its way across our summer.

As ideas multiplied and arguments grew more heated, the manifestations themselves grew less frequent. Soon small groups began to form, composed of people intent on observing and even encouraging the incidents. Three or four friends would gather at a set time, at dusk or late at night, in a living room or bedroom. They would turn off the lights, except for a four-watt night-light set in the baseboard. For hours they would talk among themselves as if they were casually gathered there, an easygoing group of friends with nothing much to do on a summer evening, all the while watching closely for signs of stirring in darkened corners. The new burst of sightings that emerged from these exercises caused a brief excitement, but the evidence they offered was always in question, since it was difficult not to feel an element of contrivance and self-deception at the heart of those meetings. By the end of June, the few reports of manifestations no longer attracted serious attention.

It was now that we began to hear of new groups, hidden gatherings. These shadowy associations rejected the belief in manifestations as literal intrusions of another realm, while arguing that they were clues or shadow-events intended to call into question the claims of the visible world. One such group, the Silents, was composed of older teenagers and young adults. The Silents met secretly and followed strict dietary rules that limited them to grains and juices. What brought them to our attention was the rumor that they practiced something called Ultrasex. From our bedroom windows at night we would sometimes see them, young people in flowing gowns, moving through the streets toward secluded places. In basement playrooms, in church graveyards, in small clearings in the north woods, they would hold their meetings, after which they would lie down in pairs and strive for a consummation that had nothing to do with the body. Love, desire, lust itself, according to the Silents, were strictly immaterial events. Touching, hugging, kissing, stroking, rubbing, to say nothing of sexual intercourse, were all forms of failure — descents into the realm of matter. Members of the group were encouraged to lie as close as possible beside a partner, who was often partially naked, and, while rigorously abstaining from the act of touch, give way to sensations of desire of such ferocious intensity that the body seemed to dissolve in flames. It was said that this discipline, far from punishing the flesh, made use of the material body to create sustained heights of spiritual ecstasy, in comparison to which the most violent orgasm was the twitch of an eyelid.

Those of us who deplored such practices understood they could not last, while at the same time we acknowledged that the turn away from the body was only another sign that the old satisfactions could no longer be taken for granted.

It was about this time that we became aware of something else, as we lay awake at night with closed eyes and unquiet minds. At first it was only a faint noise, a scratching sound in the dark. Soon you could almost hear them: breaking into the cement with their picks, digging down with their shovels and spades. From the outset we called them the tunnelers. In houses scattered throughout our town, in ranch-house developments and older neighborhoods, they were said to be at work, the same family men who in other summers had gone bowling or settled down with a beer and a bowl of chips in front of the TV. Sometimes after dinner, sometimes late at night when their wives and children were asleep, they would go down to their cellars and continue digging. And though the tunnelers themselves never spoke of their work, so that we had to rely on rumors and thirdhand reports, we believed in the tunnels, we understood them immediately. In that relentless digging, that digging to nowhere, we saw a desire to burst the bonds of the house, to set forth, from the familiar place, into the unknown. Sometimes a tunneler would raise his pick over his shoulder, swing it against the beckoning dirt, and feel a sudden loosening. A moment later he’d break through to another tunnel, where a neighbor was hard at work. Then the intruder would lean on the handle of his pick, wipe his forehead with the back of a sleeve, and exchange a few awkward words, before retreating and changing direction.

In our beds at night, listening to the call of crickets and the rush of trucks on the thruway, we could hear that other, more elusive sound, which might have been the sound of many shovels striking against earth and stone — and we had the sense that down there, all across town, beneath our bedrooms and kitchens and neatly mown backyards, far down beneath the roots of pine trees and the haunts of garden worms, a web of passageways was being woven, an intricate system of crisscrossing hollows, so that our yards and houses sat upon a thin crust of earth that at any moment might burst open with a roar.

Sometimes at night I would wake up and think: I’ve got to get away, I’ve got to go somewhere, right now, soon, first thing tomorrow. Then an excitement would ripple through me, as if I were already packing my bags, already dropping my shoes into the airport basket. In the long hours of the night my excitement would gradually lessen, until by morning I no longer remembered what it was, exactly, that I’d made up my mind to do.

As if in response to the tunnelers, the roof-dwellers appeared. We all knew how it started. One morning David Lindquist, a retired handyman who lived in a two-story carriage house set back on a dead-end road, climbed onto his roof. There he built a simple shelter against the chimney and refused to come down. His wife delivered food through a trapdoor in the attic ceiling. Lindquist had contrived a system of pipes that connected to the plumbing, and he’d brought up a hose to flush down waste. He refused to talk to reporters, but his wife told them that her husband really liked it up there; he’d always been drawn to heights. What struck us wasn’t so much Lindquist’s eccentricity as his austerity. It was said that he lived on a diet of bread, water, and fruit, sat for long hours gazing out at the surrounding trees, and trained himself to sleep in the angle where two roof slopes met.

A few days later, in another part of town, Thomas Dombek, a college junior home for the summer, moved onto the roof of his parents’ house two blocks from the beach. Here and there a few more imitators appeared — it seemed inevitable. But we weren’t prepared for the sudden rush to the roof that now took place, in the middle of July. You could see them in every neighborhood, carrying long boards up ladders that leaned against the gutters. Soon we could see shelters springing from rooftops like the TV antennas we remembered from childhood. It was as if the houses of our town were no longer large enough to contain our desires. From our front porches, from folding chairs in our backyards, we watched the odd structures rising on roof crests. The art was to fasten a base over two slopes of roof and continue with walls or a protective rail. All over town you could hear a great ringing of hammers. At lunchtime, workmen in T-shirts sat on sunny roofs, tipping their heads back to drink from bottles of soda that caught the sun. Children looked up, shading their eyes.

Of course not everyone could follow the difficult example of David Lindquist. Most people simply flung themselves into the new fashion for recreational roof-dwelling without a thought of permanent residence. For them, a roof-house was a form of elevated porch. In the hot nights of July you could see them sleeping up there, under the stars.

But now and then a different kind of roof-dweller emerged. Highly disciplined, solitary and fervid, the lonely ones would sit motionless for long hours at a time, wrapped in silence. Sometimes one would rise slowly and address the streets. The roof-dweller would speak of the Way — by which was meant the way out of unhappiness and despair, the way into spiritual peace. People would gather in the street below, listen for a while, and pass on. One of these lay preachers, a tall woman named Verna Coombs, who wore overalls and work boots and a red bandanna, called herself a Transcensionist and quickly attracted followers. The Transcensionists rejected the world below, which was the realm of heaviness and dissatisfaction, and embraced the upper world, the true world beyond appearances.

At times it seemed to us that another place, an unknown place, was trying to emerge from within our town. It burrowed in the earth below our cellars, rose up silently in the corners of living rooms, trembled in the air above our rooftops.

I would come upon it sometimes, that other place. Turning a corner onto a familiar street, with its front porches and Norway maples, its yellow hydrant and brown telephone poles, I would feel a strangeness. The sunlight seemed not to strike the house sides directly but to fall in between. Shadows shifted, objects seemed liberated from the constrictions of light and were on the verge of becoming themselves, the sidewalks shook silently, everything glittered and trembled, while up above, the tight-stretched blue sky was being pulled from both sides until it was about to rip down the middle — then it all stopped, the street settled down, the sidewalks returned to their stillness, and I walked past white-painted downspouts with vertical grooves that stood out clearly, past dandelions thick with petals that, as I glanced at them, became sharp as knife blades.

Was it in the last weeks of July that we began to notice a change in the children? We knew of course that they’d already been affected in small ways by the events breaking out all around them. How could they have escaped untouched? But we had been preoccupied with rumor and speculation, we had grown a little careless, we’d failed to give the children our full attention. It was the Game that brought them back into our awareness. You would see them in their yards, walking slowly, too slowly, and suddenly stepping around something that seemed to be in their way. Sometimes they held out their arms as if they were walking in the dark, though the sun shone down from a cloudless sky and their shadows stood out sharply against the cut grass. Gradually we learned the nature of the Game. The children were summoning up imaginary places and walking around in them for hours at a time. The idea was to stay longer and longer there, to stay there forever. Backyards containing a swing set and a length of hose became dense forests teeming with dwarves and wolves. When the children opened the doors of their rooms, they entered the holds of sunken ships, towers with winding stairways, hollow mountains where white animals drank from black streams.

At dinner the children sat quietly, with dreamy stares. If parents interrupted their trances by hurling questions at them, they answered carefully, politely, with an air of faint distress.

One case that drew some attention was that of little Julie Goudreau. She was seven years old. One afternoon in August she was found sitting on the grass in the middle of her next-door neighbor’s backyard. When Mrs. Waters came out to see what was the matter, Julie told her that she was lost and could never find her way home. “But you live right over there, dear,” said Mrs. Waters, pointing at the next yard, separated from her own by a driveway and three azalea bushes. Julie turned her head to look in the direction toward which Mrs. Waters had pointed. What struck Catherine Waters was the expression on Julie’s face — she stared at her own yard with a little puzzled frown of concentration, as if she were gazing at something she’d never seen before. Then she turned back and looked down at her hand lying in the grass. Mrs. Waters bent over to help her up. At that moment, Julie turned to look at her. It was a look of such rage that Mrs. Waters stepped back. “I hate you,” Julie said, quietly and distinctly. She lowered her eyes and sat stubbornly there, refusing to say another word, until her mother came and dragged her home.

Even as we worried about our children, and blamed ourselves for neglecting them under the pressure of our own distractions, we found ourselves drawn to those trancelike stares, those dreamy gazes, and wondered what it would be like to burst open our days with inner voyages.

It may be that I’ve given a misleading impression. I don’t mean things were only that way. Even in the early days of the manifestations, when it seemed that every living room was about to erupt with mysterious life, we drove our cars to work, we sat down to dinner, we pushed our shopping carts along the frozen food aisles. On tree-shaded street corners, joggers with headbands ran in place, waiting for a car to turn. The sound of chain saws and wood chippers filled the suburban air. On a hot, shady porch, in the languor of a midsummer afternoon, a high school girl in jean cutoffs and a bikini top sipped lemonade from a tall straw, while she twirled a loop of reddish brown hair around and around and around her finger.

Meanwhile, as if they’d been watching the children from behind the edges of closed blinds, the old people of our town began to emerge from their hiding places. We saw them late at night, gathered on dark front porches, silently rocking. They seemed to be waiting for something that was about to happen. Sometimes we would catch sight of them moving very slowly across our backyards, taking small steps, their heads bent toward the ground, the rubber tips of their canes and walkers pressing into the grass. The paper reported that one night at two in the morning four “oldsters,” ranging in age from eighty-six to ninety-three, made their way down the beach to the water’s edge, where they were discovered by a policeman. They were staring out at the water. The tide was coming in, and the low waves had already covered their shoes and ankles by the time the officer found them.

Sometimes we had the feeling that at any moment, around any corner, suddenly the summer would reveal its secret, and a peace, like soothing rain, would descend on us.

By the middle of August we felt the exhaustion of adventures that had never taken us far enough. At the same time we were inflamed by a kind of sharp, overripe alertness to possibilities untried. In the languor and stillness of perfect afternoons, we could already feel the last days of summer, coming toward us with their burden of regret. What had we done, really? What had we ever done? There was a sense that it all should have led to something, a sense that a necessary culmination had somehow failed to come about. And always the days passed, like riddles we would never solve.

It was one of those rich late days of August when the air seemed to quiver with light and heat, so that you felt you were looking at things through a faint haze, though the sky was brilliantly clear. Was it the haze of our accumulated desires? For in the last weeks of summer our longings had grown stronger and more demanding, unappeased by our tunnels and roof-dwellings, our gatherings and investigations, which seemed to us now, when we thought back on them, feeble emblems of whatever it was that eluded us. The day was Saturday — the last one of August. It felt like the last Saturday of the year, the last Saturday of all time. As we moved through the morning and afternoon, filled with vague unrest, we were scarcely present, in our backyards and on our front porches, at our picnic tables and at the beach, we were straining in other directions, we were elsewhere.

The change began around dusk. We had come home, most of us, from wherever the day had taken us. We’d finished dinner, we were waiting for the rest of the day to come about — waiting, in the peculiar way of that summer, for something worthy of our desires. The sun had slipped out of sight, though the tops of telephone poles and high trees were still touched by light. The sky was pale blue. Here and there, a lamp went on in a window. It was the time of day when it was really two times of day — above, the still-bright sky; below, the beginnings of night. It was as if the day had paused for a moment, unable to make up its mind. And we, in our various places, were probably not paying close attention, had perhaps fallen into a muse, an inner pause of our own. Someone must have been the first: the hand reaching idly out and rippling through the lamp table, drifting through the lamp. It happened in street after street: the shoulder moving through the bathroom door, the hand floating through the armchair, dropping through the porch rail. Some reported a faint resistance, like the sensation of passing a hand through cool water, or of pushing through cobwebs. Others felt nothing at all. Some claimed to hear, rising from the houses of our town, a communal gasp or sigh. In the wonder of that moment, we understood that our summer had risen to meet us.

Warily, joyfully, we moved through our houses with arms held wide, passing through objects that no longer resisted us. We entered the streets, where people wandered as if under a spell. Children, crazed with laughter, ran back and forth through the trunks of maples. We walked through hedges and white picket fences, stepped through the sides of porches, passed through the walls of houses into other backyards. Through swing sets and birdbaths we strolled along. We made our way over to Main Street, where streetlights glowed in the pale sky, and crowds tense with awe moved through store windows. Someone pointed up: a sparrow, trying to land on the crossbar of a telephone pole, passed through and began beating its wings fiercely before sweeping back up into the sky.

Who can say how long it lasted? We plunged into that dusk as if we’d always known what lay under the skin of the world. We reveled in dissolution. Under the darkening sky we wandered through our town like children after a first snow.

Just before nightfall, when there was still a little light left in the sky, we became aware of a slight thickening. As we stepped through things, we could feel a satiny tickle. Someone cried out: he had banged his knee against the side of a store. Things hardened part by part. Here and there, a hand was caught in wood or stone.

Later, when we tried to understand it all, when we tried to give it a meaning, some said that maybe, at a certain moment, around the beginning of dusk, everyone in our town had been dreaming of something else. The town, deprived of our attention, had begun to tremble and waver, to grow insubstantial. Others, more skeptical, proposed that none of it ever happened, that a great delirium had struck our town, like an outbreak of the flu. Still others argued that we had been given a revelation but hadn’t known what to do with it. Our ignorance had ushered in the reign of hardness.

Whatever may have happened that day, we woke the next morning as if we’d slept for a month. Sunlight streamed into our rooms. We reached out and touched the edges of things. In our kitchens, chairs stood out sharply, as if they’d sprung up from the floor. We felt in our hands the weight of spoons, felt against our fingers the rims of cereal bowls. We pushed against doors, felt on the soles of our feet the thrust of doormats and front steps. Outside, we ran our fingers along bush branches and hedge branches, we squeezed hoses and steering wheels, the rubber grips of lawn mowers. On Main Street we grasped the handles of glass doors, we picked up objects that tugged back, filled shopping bags that pulled against our palms. All day we felt the push of sidewalks, the surge of grass. All day we felt the weight of sunlight settling on our arms. All day we felt, grazing our skin, the blue of the sky, the edges of shade. Sometimes we recalled that other summer, but already it was a story we would tell, in warm living rooms in winter, about the time we wandered through the streets at dusk with our arms held wide, a long time ago, in some other life.