Dangerous Laughter

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ELAINE COLEMAN

THE NEWS OF the disappearance disturbed and excited us. For weeks afterward, the blurred and grainy photograph of a young woman no one seemed to know, though some of us vaguely remembered her, appeared on yellow posters displayed on the glass doors of the post office, on telephone poles, on windows of the CVS and the renovated supermarket. The small photo showed a serious face turned partly away, above a fur collar; the picture seemed to be an enlargement of a casual snapshot, perhaps originally showing a full-length view — the sort of picture, we imagined, taken carelessly by a bored relative to commemorate an occasion. For a time women were warned not to go out alone at night, while the investigation pursued its futile course. Gradually the posters became rain-wrinkled and streaked with grime, the blurred photos seemed to be fading away, and then one day they were gone, leaving behind a faint uneasiness that itself dissolved slowly in the smoke-scented autumn air.

According to the newspaper reports, the last person to see Elaine Coleman alive was a neighbor, Mrs. Mary Blessington, who greeted her on the final evening as Elaine stepped out of her car and began to walk along the path of red slates leading to the side entrance of the house on Willow Street where she rented two rooms on the second floor. Mary Blessington was raking leaves. She leaned on her rake, waved to Elaine Coleman, and remarked on the weather. She noticed nothing unusual about the quiet young woman walking at dusk toward the side door, carrying in one arm a small paper bag (probably containing the quart of milk found unopened in her refrigerator) and holding her keys in the other hand. When questioned further about Elaine Coleman’s appearance as she walked toward the house, Mary Blessington admitted that it was almost dark and that she couldn’t make her out “all that well.” The landlady, Mrs. Waters, who lived on the first floor and rented upstairs rooms to two boarders, described Elaine Coleman as a quiet person, steady, very polite. She went to bed early, never had visitors, and paid her rent unfailingly on the first of the month. She liked to stay by herself, the landlady added. On the last evening Mrs. Waters heard Elaine’s footsteps climbing the stairs as usual to her apartment on the second floor in back. The landlady did not actually see her, on that occasion. The next morning she noticed the car still parked in front, even though it was a Wednesday and Miss Coleman never missed a day of work. In the afternoon, when the mail came, Mrs. Waters decided to carry a letter upstairs to her boarder, who she assumed was sick. The door was locked. She knocked gently, then louder and louder, before opening the door with a duplicate key. She hesitated a long time before calling the police.

For days we spoke of nothing else. We read the newspapers ardently, the local Messenger and the papers from neighboring towns; we studied the posters, we memorized the facts, we interpreted the evidence, we imagined the worst.

The photograph, bad and blurry though it was, left its own sharp impression: a woman caught in the act of looking away, a woman evading scrutiny. Her blurred eyes were half closed, the turned-up collar of her jacket concealed the line of her jaw, and a crinkled strand of hair came straggling down over her cheek. She looked, though it was difficult to tell, as if she had hunched her shoulders against the cold. But what struck some of us about the photograph was what it seemed to conceal. It was as if beneath that grainy cheek, that blurred and narrow nose with the skin pulled tight across the bridge, lay some other, younger, more familiar image. Some of us recalled dimly an Elaine, an Elaine Coleman, in our high school, a young Elaine of fourteen or fifteen years ago who had been in our classes, though none of us could remember her clearly or say where she sat or what she did. I myself seemed to recall an Elaine Coleman in English class, sophomore or junior year, a quiet girl, someone I hadn’t paid much attention to. In my old yearbook I found her, Elaine Coleman. I did not recognize her face. At the same time it didn’t seem the face of a stranger. It appeared to be the missing woman on the poster, though in another key, so that you didn’t make the connection immediately. The photograph was slightly overexposed, making her seem a little washed out, a little flat — there was a bright indistinctness about her. She was neither pretty nor unpretty. Her face was half turned away, her expression serious; her hair, done up in the style of the time, showed the shine of a careful combing. She had joined no clubs, played no sports, belonged to nothing.

The only other photograph of her was a group picture of our homeroom class. She stood in the third row from the front, her body turned awkwardly to one side, her eyes lowered, her features difficult to distinguish.

In the early days of her disappearance I kept trying to remember her, the dim girl in my English class who had grown up into a blurred and grainy stranger. I seemed to see her sitting at her maplewood desk beside the radiator, looking down at a book, her arms thin and pale, her brown hair falling partly behind her shoulder and partly before, a quiet girl in a long skirt and white socks, but I could never be certain I wasn’t making her up. One night I dreamed her: a girl with black hair who looked at me gravely. I woke up oddly stirred and relieved, but as I opened my eyes I realized that the girl in my dream was Miriam Blumenthal, a witty and laughing girl with blazing black hair, who in dream-disguise had presented herself to me as the missing Elaine.

One detail that troubled us was that Elaine Coleman’s keys were discovered on the kitchen table, beside an open newspaper and a saucer. The key ring with its six keys and its silver kitten, the brown leather pocketbook containing her wallet, the fleece-lined coat on the back of a chair, all this suggested a sudden and disturbing departure, but it was the keys that attracted our particular attention, for they included the key to her apartment. We learned that the door could be locked in two ways: from the inside, by turning a knob that slid a bolt, and from the outside, with a key. If the door was locked and the key inside, then Elaine Coleman cannot have left by the door — unless there was another key. It was possible, though no one believed it, that someone with a second key had entered and left through her door, or that Elaine herself, using a second key, had left by the door and locked it from the outside. But a thorough police investigation discovered no record of a duplicate. It seemed far more likely that she had left by one of the four windows. Two were in the kitchen — living room facing the back, and two in the bedroom facing the back and side. In the bathroom there was a small fifth window, no more than twelve inches in height and width, through which it would have been impossible to enter or exit. Directly below the four main windows grew a row of hydrangea and rhododendron bushes. All four windows were closed, though not locked, and the outer storm windows were in place. It seemed necessary to imagine that Elaine Coleman had deliberately escaped through a second-floor window, fifteen feet up in the air, when she might far more easily have left by the door, or that an intruder had entered through a window and carried her off, taking care to pull both panes back into place. But the bushes, grass, and leaves below the four windows showed no trace of disturbance, nor was there any evidence in the rooms to suggest a break-in.

The second boarder, Mrs. Helen Ziolkowski, a seventy-year-old widow who had lived in the front apartment for twenty years, described Elaine Coleman as a nice young woman, quiet, very pale, the sort who kept to herself. It was the first we had heard of her pallor, which lent her a certain allure. On the last evening Mrs. Ziolkowski heard the door close and the bolt turn in the lock. She heard the refrigerator door open and close, light footsteps moving about, a dish rattling, a teapot whistling. It was a quiet house and you could hear a lot. She had heard no unusual sounds, no screams, no voices, nothing at any time that might have suggested a struggle. In fact it had been absolutely quiet in Elaine Coleman’s apartment from about seven o’clock on; she had been surprised not to hear the usual sounds of dinner being prepared in the kitchen. She herself had gone to bed at eleven o’clock. She was a light sleeper and was up often at night.

I wasn’t the only one who kept trying to remember Elaine Coleman. Others who had gone to high school with me, and who now lived in our town with families of their own, remained puzzled or uncertain about who she was, though no one doubted she had actually been there. One of us thought he recalled her in biology, sophomore year, bent over a frog fastened to the black wax of a dissecting pan. Another recalled her in English class, senior year, not by the radiator but at the back of the room — a girl who didn’t say much, a girl with uninteresting hair. But though he remembered her clearly, or said he did, there at the back of the room, he could not remember anything more about her, he couldn’t summon up any details.

One night, about three weeks after the disappearance, I woke from a troubling dream that had nothing to do with Elaine Coleman — I was in a room without windows, there was a greenish light, some frightening force was gathering behind the closed door — and sat up in bed. The dream itself no longer upset me, but it seemed to me that I was on the verge of recalling something. In startling detail I remembered a party I had gone to, when I was fifteen or sixteen. I saw the basement playroom very clearly: the piano with sheet music open on the rack, the shine of the piano lamp on the white pages and on the stockings of a girl sitting in a nearby armchair, the striped couch, some guys in the corner playing a child’s game with blocks, the cigarette smoke, the bowl of pretzel sticks — and there on a hassock near the window, leaning forward a little, wearing a white blouse and a long dark skirt, her hands in her lap, Elaine Coleman. Her face was sketchy — dark hair some shade of brown, grainy skin — and not entirely to be trusted, since it showed signs of having been infected by the photograph of the missing Elaine, but I had no doubt that I had remembered her.

I tried to bring her into sharper focus, but it was as if I hadn’t looked at her directly. The more I tried to recapture that evening, the more sharply I was able to see details of the basement playroom (my hands on the chipped white piano keys, the green and red and yellow blocks forming a higher and higher tower, someone on the swim team moving his arms out from his chest as he demonstrated the butterfly, the dazzling knees of Lorraine Palermo in sheer stockings), but I could not summon Elaine Coleman’s face.

According to the landlady, the bedroom showed no signs of disturbance. The pillow had been removed from under the bedclothes and placed against the headboard. On the nightstand a cup half filled with tea rested on a postcard announcing the opening of a new hardware store. The bedspread was slightly rumpled; on it lay a white flannel nightgown printed with tiny pale-blue flowers, and a fat paperback resting open against the spread. The lamp on the nightstand was still on.

We tried to imagine the landlady in the bedroom doorway, her first steps into the quiet room, the afternoon sunlight streaming in past the closed venetian blinds, the pale, hot bulb in the sun-streaked lamp.

The newspapers reported that Elaine Coleman had gone on from high school to attend a small college in Vermont, where she majored in business and wrote one drama review for the school paper. After graduation she lived for a year in the same college town, waitressing at a seafood restaurant; then she returned to our town, where she lived for a few years in a one-room apartment before moving to the two-room apartment on Willow Street. During her college years her parents had moved to California, from where the father, an electrician, moved alone to Oregon. “She didn’t have a mean bone in her body,” her mother was quoted as saying. Elaine worked for a year on the town paper, waited on tables, worked in the post office and a coffee shop, before getting a job in a business supply store in a neighboring town. People remembered her as a quiet woman, polite, a good worker. She seemed to have no close friends.

I now recalled catching glimpses of a half-familiar face during summers home from college, and later, when I returned to town and settled down. I had long ago forgotten her name. She would be standing at the far end of a supermarket aisle, or on line in a drugstore, or disappearing into a store on Main Street. I noticed her without looking at her, as one might notice a friend’s aunt. If our paths crossed, I would nod and pass by, thinking of other things. After all, we had never been friends, she and I — we had never been anything. She was someone I’d gone to high school with, that was all, someone I scarcely knew, though it was also true that I had nothing against her. Was it really the missing Elaine? Only after her disappearance did those fleeting encounters seem pierced by a poignance I knew to be false, though I couldn’t help feeling it anyway, for it was as if I ought to have stopped and talked to her, warned her, saved her, done something.

My second vivid memory of Elaine Coleman came to me three days after my memory of the party. It was sometime in high school, and I was out walking with my friend Roger on one of those sunny autumn afternoons when the sky is so blue and clear that it ought to be summer, but the sugar maples have turned red and yellow, and smoke from leaf fires stings your eyes. We had gone for a long walk into an unfamiliar neighborhood on the other side of town. Here the houses were small, with detached garages; on the lawns you saw an occasional plastic yellow sunflower or fake deer. Roger was talking about a girl he was crazy about, who played tennis and lived in a fancy house on Gideon Hill, and I was advising him to disguise himself as a caretaker and apply for a job trimming her rosebushes. “The yard move,” I said. “It gets ’em every time.” “She would never respect me,” Roger answered seriously. We were passing a garage where a girl in jeans and a dark parka was tossing a basketball into a hoop without a net. The garage door was open and you could see old furniture inside, couches with lamps lying on them and tables holding upside-down chairs. The basketball hit the rim and came bouncing down the drive toward us. I caught it and tossed it back to the girl, who had started after it but had stopped upon seeing us. I recognized Elaine Coleman. “Thanks,” she said, holding the basketball in two hands and hesitating a moment before she lowered her eyes and turned away.

What struck me, as I remembered that afternoon, was the moment of hesitation. It might have meant a number of things, such as “Do you and Roger want to shoot a few?” or “I’d like to invite you to shoot a basket but I don’t want to ask you if you don’t really want to” or maybe something else entirely, but in that moment, which seemed a moment of uncertainty, Roger glanced sharply at me and mouthed a silent “No.” What troubled my memory was the sense that Elaine had seen that look, that judgment; she must have been skilled at reading dismissive signs. We walked away into the blue afternoon of high autumn, talking about the girl on Gideon Hill, and in the clear air I could hear the sharp, repeated sound of the basketball striking the driveway as Elaine Coleman walked back toward the garage.

Is it true that whatever has once been seen is in the mind forever? After my second memory I expected an eruption of images, as if they had only been waiting for the chance to reveal themselves. In senior year of high school I must have seen her every day in English class and homeroom, must have passed her in the halls and seen her in the cafeteria, to say nothing of the inevitable chance meetings in the streets and stores of a small town, but aside from the party and the garage I could summon no further image, not one. Nor could I see her face. It was as if she had no face, no features. Even the three photographs appeared to be of three different people, or perhaps they were three versions of a single person no one had ever seen. And so I returned to my two memories, as if they contained a secret that only intense scrutiny could bring to light. But though I saw, always more clearly, the chipped yellowish-white keys of the piano, the glittering stockings, the blue autumn sky, the sun glinting into the shadowy garage with its chairs and tables and boxes, though I saw, or seemed to see, the scuffed black loafer and white ribbed sock of a foot near the piano and the sparkling black shingles on the garage roof, I could not see more of Elaine Coleman than I had already remembered: the hands in the lap, at the party; the moment of hesitation, in the driveway.

During the first few weeks, when the story still seemed important, the newspapers located someone named Richard Baxter, who worked in a chemical plant in a nearby town. He had last seen Elaine Coleman three years ago. “We went out a few times,” he was quoted as saying. “She was a nice girl, quiet. She didn’t really have all that much to say.” He didn’t remember too much about her, he said.

The bafflement of the police, the lack of clues, the locked door, the closed windows, led me to wonder whether we were formulating the problem properly, whether we were failing to take into account some crucial element. In all discussions of the disappearance only two possibilities, in all their variations, were ever considered: abduction and escape. The first possibility, although it could never be entirely discounted, had been decisively called into question by the police investigation, which found in the rooms and the yard no evidence whatever of an intruder. It therefore seemed more reasonable to imagine that Elaine Coleman had left of her own volition. Indeed it was tempting to believe that by an act of will she had broken from her lonely routine and set forth secretly to start a new life. Alone, friendless, restless, unhappy, and nearing her thirtieth birthday, she had at last overcome some inner constriction and surrendered herself to the lure of adventure. This theory was able to make clever use of the abandoned keys, wallet, coat, and car, which became the very proof of the radical nature of her break from everything familiar in her life. Skeptics pointed out that she wasn’t likely to get very far without her credit card, her driver’s license, and the twenty-seven dollars and thirty-four cents found in her wallet. But what finally rendered the theory suspect was the conventional and hopelessly romantic nature of the imagined escape, which not only required her to triumph over the quiet habits of a lifetime, but was so much what we might have wished for her that it seemed penetrated by desires not her own. Thus I wondered whether there might not be some other way to account for the disappearance, some bolder way that called for a different, more elusive, more dangerous logic.

The police searched the north woods with dogs, dragged the pond behind the lumberyard. For a while there were rumors that she’d been kidnapped in the parking lot where she worked, but two employees had seen her drive off, Mary Blessington had waved to her in the evening, and Mrs. Ziolkowski had heard her closing the refrigerator door, rattling a dish, moving around.

If there was no abduction and no escape, then Elaine Coleman must have climbed the stairs, entered her apartment, locked her door, put the milk in the refrigerator, hung her coat over the back of a chair, and — disappeared. Period. End of discussion. Or to put it another way: the disappearance must have taken place within the apartment itself. If one ruled out abduction and escape, then Elaine Coleman ought to have been found somewhere in her rooms — perhaps dead in a closet. But the police investigation had been thorough. She appeared to have vanished from her rooms as completely as she had vanished from my mind, leaving behind only a scattering of clues to suggest she had ever been there.

As the investigation slowly unraveled, as the posters faded and at length disappeared, I tried desperately to remember more of Elaine Coleman, as if I owed her at least the courtesy of recollection. What bothered me wasn’t so much the disappearance itself, since I had scarcely known her, or even the possible ugliness of that disappearance, but my own failure of memory. Others recalled her still more dimly. It was as if none of us had ever looked at her, or had looked at her while thinking of something more interesting. I felt that we were guilty of some obscure crime. For it seemed to me that we who had seen her now and then out of the corner of our eyes, we who had seen her without seeing her, who without malice had failed to give her our full attention, were already preparing her for the fate that overtook her, were already, in a sense not yet clear to me, pushing her in the direction of disappearance.

It was during this time of failed recollection that I had what can only be called a pseudo-memory of Elaine Coleman, which haunted me precisely to the extent that I did not know how much of her it contained. The time was two or three years before the disappearance. I remembered that I was at a movie theater with a friend, my friend’s wife, and a woman I was seeing then. It was a foreign movie, black and white, with subtitles; I remembered my friend’s wife laughing wildly at the childish translation of a curse while the actor on the screen smashed his fist against a door. I recalled a big tub of popcorn that the four of us passed back and forth. I recalled the chill of the air-conditioning, which made me long for the heat of the summer night. Slowly the lights came on, the credits continued to roll, and as the four of us began making our way up the crowded aisle I noticed a woman in dark clothes rising from a seat near the far aisle. I caught only a glimpse of her before looking irritably away. She reminded me of someone I half knew, maybe the girl from my high school whom I sometimes saw and whose name I had forgotten, and I didn’t want to catch her eye, didn’t want to be forced to exchange meaningless, awkward words with her, whoever she was. In the bright, jammed lobby I braced myself for the worthless meeting. But for some reason she never emerged from the theater, and as I stepped with relief into the heat of the summer night, which already was beginning to seem oppressive, I wondered whether she’d hung back on purpose because she had seen me turning irritably away. Then I felt a moment of remorse for my harshness toward the half-seen woman in the theater, the pseudo-Elaine, for after all I had nothing against her, the girl who had once been in my English class.

Like a detective, like a lover, I returned relentlessly to the few images I had of her: the dim girl at the party, the girl with the basketball who lowered her eyes, the turned-away face in the yearbook picture, the blurred police photo, the vague person, older now, whom I nodded to occasionally in town, the woman in the theater. I felt as if I’d wronged her in some way, as if I had something to atone for. The paltry images seemed to taunt me, as if they held the secret of her disappearance. The hazy girl, the blurred photo…Sometimes I felt an inner shaking or trembling, as if I were on the verge of an overwhelming revelation.

One night I dreamed that I was playing basketball with Elaine Coleman. The driveway was also the beach, the ball kept splashing in shallow water, but Elaine Coleman was laughing, her face was radiant though somehow hidden, and when I woke I felt that the great failure in my life was never to have evoked that laughter.

As the weather grew colder, I began to notice that people no longer wanted to talk about Elaine Coleman. She had simply disappeared, that was all, and one day she’d be found, or forgotten, and that would be that. Life would go on. Sometimes I had the impression that people were angry at her, as if by disappearing she had complicated our lives.

One sunny afternoon in January I drove to the house on Willow Street. I knew the street, lined now with bare, twisted maples that threw long shadows across the road and onto the fronts of the houses opposite. A brilliant blue mailbox stood at one corner, beside a telephone pole with a drum-shaped transformer high up under the crossarm. I parked across from the house, but not directly across, and looked at it furtively, as if I were breaking a law. It was a house like many on the block, two-storied and wood-shingled, with side gables and a black roof. The shingles were painted light gray and the shutters black. I saw pale curtains in all the windows, and the path of red slates leading to the door in the side of the house. The door had two small windows near the top, and they too were curtained. I saw a row of bare bushes and a piece of the backyard, where a bird feeder hung from a branch. I tried to imagine her life there, in the quiet house, but I could imagine nothing, nothing at all. It seemed to me that she had never lived there, never gone to my high school — that she was the town’s dream, as it lay napping in the cold sun of a January afternoon.

I drove away from that peaceful, mocking street, which seemed to say, “There’s nothing wrong here. We’re a respectable street. You’ve had your look, now give it up,” but I was farther than ever from letting her go. Helplessly I rummaged through my images, searched for clues, sensed directions that led nowhere. I felt her slipping from me, vanishing, a ghost-girl, a blurred photo, a woman without features, a figure in dark clothes rising from her seat and floating away.

I returned to the newspaper reports, which I kept in a folder on my night table. One detail that struck me was that the landlady had not actually seen Elaine Coleman on the final evening before her disappearance. The neighbor, who had waved to her at dusk, had not been able to make her out all that well.

Two nights later I woke suddenly, startled as if by a dream, though I could recall no dream. A moment later the truth shook me like a blow to the temple.

Elaine Coleman did not disappear suddenly, as the police believed, but gradually, over the course of time. Those years of sitting unnoticed in corners, of not being looked at, must have given her a queasy, unstable sense of herself. Often she must have felt almost invisible. If it’s true that we exist by impressing ourselves on other minds, by entering other imaginations, then the quiet, unremarkable girl whom no one noticed must at times have felt herself growing vague, as if she were gradually being erased by the world’s inattention. In high school, the process of blurring begun much earlier had probably not yet reached a critical stage; her face, with its characteristically lowered and averted eyes, had grown only a little uncertain. By the time she returned from college, the erasure had become more advanced. The woman glimpsed in town without ever being seen, the unimagined person whom no one could recall clearly, was growing dim, fading away, vanishing, like a room at dusk. She was moving irrevocably toward the realm of dream.

On that last evening, when Mary Blessington waved to her in the dusk without really seeing her, Elaine Coleman was scarcely more than a shadow. She climbed the stairs to her room, locked the door as usual, put the milk in the refrigerator, and hung her coat over the back of a chair. Behind her the secondhand mirror barely reflected her. She heated the kettle and sat at the kitchen table, reading the paper and drinking a cup of tea. Had she been feeling tired lately, or was there a sense of lightness, of anticipation? In the bedroom she set her cup of tea down on a postcard on her nightstand and changed into her heavy white nightgown with its little blue flowers. Later, when she felt rested, she would make dinner. She pulled out the pillow and lay down with a book. Dusk was deepening into early night. In the darkening room she could see a shadowy nightstand, the sleeve of a sweater hanging on a chair, the faint shape of her body on the bed. She turned on the lamp and tried to read. Her eyes, heavy lidded, began to close. I imagined a not-unpleasant tiredness, a feeling of finality, a sensation of dispersion. The next day there was nothing but a nightgown and a paperback on a bed.

It may have been a little different; one evening she may have become aware of what was happening to her, she may, in a profound movement of her being, have embraced her fate and joined forces with the powers of dissolution.

She is not alone. On street corners at dusk, in the corridors of dark movie theaters, behind the windows of cars in parking lots at melancholy shopping centers illuminated by pale orange lamps, you sometimes see them, the Elaine Colemans of this world. They lower their eyes, they turn away, they vanish into shadowy places. Sometimes I seem to see, through their nearly transparent skin, a light or a building behind them. I try to catch their eyes, to penetrate them with my attention, but it’s always too late, already they are fading, fixed as they are in the long habit of not being noticed. And perhaps the police, who suspected foul play, were not in the end mistaken. For we are no longer innocent, we who do not see and do not remember, we incurious ones, we conspirators in disappearance. I too murdered Elaine Coleman. Let this account be entered in the record.

THE ROOM IN THE ATTIC

I

WAKERS AND DREAMERS

I FIRST SAW WOLF in March of junior year. This isn’t his story, but I suppose I ought to begin with him. I had slung myself into my seat with the careful nonchalance of which I was a master, and had opened my ancient brownish-red copy of The Mayor of Casterbridge, which held nothing of interest for me except the little threads of unraveling cloth along the bottom of the front cover, when I became aware of someone in the row on my right, two seats up. It was as if he’d sprung into existence a moment before. I was struck by his light gray suit — no one in our school wore a suit — and by the top of a paperback that I saw tugging down his left jacket pocket. I felt a brief pity for him, the new kid in the wrong clothes, along with a certain contempt for his suit and a curiosity about his book. He seemed to be studying the back of his left hand, though for a moment I saw him look toward the row of tall windows along the side of the room. One of them stood open, on this mild morning in 1959, held up by an upside-down flowerpot, and for some reason I imagined him striding across the room, pushing the window higher, and stepping through.

When everyone was seated, Mrs. Bassick asked the new boy to stand up. It was an act he performed with surprising grace — a tall young man, sure of himself, unsmiling but at ease in his light gray suit, his hair curving back above his ears and falling in strands over his forehead, his long hands hanging lightly at his sides, as if it were nothing at all to stand up in a roomful of strangers with all eyes on you, or as if he simply didn’t care: John Wolfson, who had moved to our town from somewhere else in Connecticut, welcome to William Harrison High. He sat down, not quickly or clumsily as I would have done, and leaned back in an attitude of polite attention as class began. Five minutes later I saw his left hand slip into his jacket pocket and remove the paperback. He held it open on his lap during the rest of class.

Later that day I passed him in the hall and saw that he had shed his jacket and tie. I imagined them hanging forlornly on a hook in his locker. The next day he appeared in a new set of clothes, which he wore with casual ease: chinos, scuffed black loafers with crushed-looking sides, and a light blue long-sleeved shirt with the cuffs rolled back twice over his forearms. I envied his ease with clothes; girls smiled at him; within a week we were calling him Wolf and feeling that he was part of things, as if he’d always been among us, this stranger with his amused gray eyes. Rumor had it that his father had been transferred suddenly from another part of Connecticut; rumor also had it that Wolf had flunked out of prep school or been thrown out for unknown reasons that seemed vaguely glamorous. He was slow-smiling, amiable, a little reserved. What struck me about him, aside from his untroubled way of fitting in, was the alien paperback I always saw among his schoolbooks. The book marked him. It was as if to say he’d gotten rid of the suit, but refused to go further. That, and the slight reserve you could feel in him, his air of self-sufficiency, the touch of mockery you sometimes felt in his smile — it all kept him from being simply popular. Sometimes it seemed to me that he had made an effort to look exactly like us, so that he could do what he liked without attracting attention.

We fell into an uneasy friendship. I too was a secret reader, though I kept my books at home, in my room with the wide bookcase and the old living-room armchair with a sagging cushion. But that wasn’t the main thing. I thought of myself, in those days, as someone in disguise — beneath the obedient son, beneath the straight-A student, the agreeable well-brought-up boy with his friends and his ping-pong and his semiofficial girlfriend, there was another being, restless, elusive, mocking, disruptive, imperious, and this shadowy underself had nothing to do with that other one who laughed with his friends and went to school dances and spent summer afternoons at the beach. In a murky sense I felt that my secret reading was a way of burrowing down to that underplace, where a truer or better version of myself lay waiting for me. But Wolf would have none of it. “A book,” he declared, “is a dream-machine.” He said this one day when we were sitting on the steps of the town library, leaning back against the pillars. “Its purpose,” he said, “is to take you out of the world.” He jerked his thumb toward the doors of the library, where I worked for two hours a day after school, three days a week. “Welcome to the dream-factory.” I protested that for me a book was something else, something to get me past whatever was standing in my way, though I didn’t know what it was that was in my way or what I wanted to get to on the other side. “What gets in your way,” Wolf said, as if he’d thought about it before, “is all this”—he waved vaguely at Main Street. “Stores, houses, classrooms, alarm clocks, dinner at six, a sound mind in a healthy body. The well-ordered life.” He shrugged and held up a book. “My ticket out of here.” He gave that slow lazy smile of his, which had, I thought, a touch of mockery in it.

He invited me to his house, one warm April day, when all the windows stood open and you could see out past the baseball field to the railroad tracks running behind it. We left together after school, I walking beside my bike as my books jumped in the dented wire basket, Wolf strolling beside me with a nylon jacket flung over one shoulder like a guy in a shirt ad and his books clutched at his hip. I lived in a newish neighborhood of ranch houses not far from the beach, but Wolf lived on the other side of town, out past the thruway, where the houses grew larger, the trees thicker and greener. We entered the shade of the thruway overpass, filled with the roar of eighteen-wheelers rumbling over our heads, then cut across a small park with slatted benches. After a while we found ourselves walking along a winding road, bordered by short brown posts with red reflectors. Here the houses were set far back from the street behind clusters of pine and oak and maple. At a driveway with a high wooden fence along one side and a high hedge on the other, we turned in and climbed a curving slope.

Around the bend, Wolf’s house appeared. Massive and shadowy, it seemed to stand too close to me as I bent my neck back to look up at the row of second-floor windows with their black shutters. The house was so dark that I was surprised to notice it was painted white; the sun struck through the high trees onto the clapboards in small bright bursts of white and burned on the black roof shingles.

“Welcome to Wolfland,” he said — and raising his right arm, he moved his long hand in a slow, graceful flourish, shaped like a tilde.

He opened the front door with a key and I followed him into a living room so gloomy that it felt as if heavy curtains had been closed across the windows. In fact the curtains were open and the windows held upward-slanted blinds that gave a broken view of sun-mottled branches. In the sunnier kitchen he tossed his books onto a table on which sat a gardening glove and an orange box of Wheaties, picked up a note that he read aloud—“Back later. Love, M”—and led me back into the living room, where a stairpost stood at the foot of a carpeted stairway. Upstairs we walked along a dusky hall with closed doors. Wolf stopped at the last one, which he opened by turning the knob and pushing with the toe of his loafer. Repeating his flourish, and adding a little bow, as if he were acting the part of a courtier paying homage to his lord, he waited for me to enter.

I stepped into a dark brown sunless room with drawn shades. One of the shades was torn at the side, letting in a line of light. “Watch out,” Wolf said, “don’t move,” as he crossed the room to an old brass floor lamp with a fringed yellowish shade and pulled the chain. The light, dark as butterscotch, shone on an old armchair that sat in a corner and looked wrong in some way. But what struck me was the book-madness of the place — books lay scattered across the unmade bed and the top of a battered-looking desk, books stood in knee-high piles on the floor, books were crammed sideways and right side up in a narrow bookcase that rose higher than my head and leaned dangerously from the wall, books sat in stacks on top of a dingy dresser. The closet door was propped open by a pile of books, and from beneath the bed a book stuck out beside the toe of a maroon slipper.

“Have a seat,” Wolf said, indicating the armchair, which I now saw was without legs. I sat down carefully in the low chair, afraid I might knock over the book piles that lay on the floor against each arm. Wolf yanked back the spread with its load of books, which went tumbling against the wall, and lay down on his back with his head against a pillow, one arm behind his neck and his ankles crossed. That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said that the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness, which was why the people who selected books for high school English classes were careful to choose only false books that were discussable, boring, and sane, or else, if they chose a real book by mistake, they presented it in a way that ignored everything great and mad about it. He said that high school was for morons and mediocrities. He said that his mother had agreed never to enter his room so long as he changed his sheets once a week. He said that books weren’t made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes. There were two kinds of people, he said, wakers and dreamers. Wakers had once had the ability to dream but had lost it, and so they hated dreamers and persecuted them in every way. He said that teachers were wakers. He spoke of writers I’d never heard of, writers such as William Prescott Pearson, A. E. Jacobs, and John Sharp, his favorite, who wrote terrific stories like “The Elevator,” about a man who one day enters an elevator in a fifty-six-story office building and never comes out except to use the public bathrooms and the food machines, and “The Infernal Roller Coaster,” about a roller coaster that goes up and up and never reaches the top, but whose masterpiece was a five-hundred-page novel that takes place entirely during the blink of an eye. Compared with these works, things like Silas Marner and The Mayor of Disasterbridge were about as interesting as newspaper supplements advertising vacuum cleaners.

“Care to see the attic?” he said suddenly. In the warm cave of books I had half closed my eyes, but Wolf had risen from the bed and was already standing at the door. I followed him out into the dusk of the hall, past the top of the stairway, to an unpainted door that looked like the door of a linen closet. It opened to reveal a flight of wooden steps. Up we went into that hot attic, where tawny sunlight streamed through a small round window, fell against bare floorboards and splintery rafters, and weakened into a brown darkness. As we passed along, I made out old couches and bureaus and armchairs, as if we’d broken into the furniture department of a big-city store. Then we came to a high old-fashioned record cabinet, which rose up to my chest; Wolf opened the top to reveal a dim turntable, on which lay a ghostly white bear with outstretched arms. He next led me to a wooden wall with a door; it opened onto a short hall, with a door on each side. He stopped at the left-hand one, knocked lightly with a single knuckle, and bent forward as if to listen.

“My sister’s room,” he then said, and ushered me in.

When he closed the door behind us I found myself in total darkness. I had the sensation that Wolf was standing close to me, but I could not see him there. Then I felt something on my upper arm and jerked away, but it was only Wolf’s hand, guiding me. Slowly he moved me forward through the blackness, as I held up an arm as if to protect my face from branches in a forest. “Sit here,” he whispered. He placed my hand on what seemed to be the high back of an upholstered chair, with a row of metal buttons running across the top.

I felt my way around the chair and sat down, while I sensed Wolf settling into another seat nearby. I was sitting in a straight-backed stiff chair with hard, upholstered arms, the sort of chair you might find in the ornate parlor of an aging actress in a black-and-white movie. “Isabel,” he said quietly, “are you awake?” I strained my eyes in that thick darkness, but I could see nothing at all. It struck me that it was all a hoax, an audacious joke meant to ridicule me in some way. At the same time I listened for the slightest sound and narrowed my eyes until they trembled with the effort to see. Anything could have been in that room.

“She’s asleep,” Wolf said, and I thought: Perfect, a perfect trick. I imagined him looking at me with a superior smile.

“Wolf?” a voice whispered, but so lightly that I wondered whether I had imagined it.

“Isabel,” Wolf’s voice said. “Are you up? I brought a visitor.”

Something stirred. I heard a sound as of bedclothes, and what seemed like a faint sigh, and somewhere in that darkness I heard the word “Hello.”

“Say hello to Isabel,” Wolf said.

“Hello,” I said, feeling irritable and absurd.

“Tell her your name,” Wolf said quietly, as if I were a shy six-year-old child, and I would have said nothing, but who knew what was going on, there in the dark.

“David,” I said. “Dave.”

“Two names,” the voice said; there was more rustling. “Two are better than one.” I wondered whether Wolf had learned the trick of throwing his voice.

“Do you like my name, David Dave?”

I hesitated. “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

“Uh-uh-uh,” she said playfully, and I imagined a finger wagging in the dark. “You had to think about it.”

“But I do,” I said, thinking quickly. “I was listening to the sound of it, in my mind.”

“Oh, that was a good answer, David Dave, a very good answer. I don’t believe you, not for a second, but I won’t make you pay a penalty, this time. So hey, how do you like my room? No no, don’t worry, just kidding. What’s Wolfie been telling you about me?”

“Not too much, actually.”

“Oh good, then you can make me up. Isabel, or The Mystery of the Haunted Chamber. Hoooo, I’m feeling tired. Will you come back and sit with me again, David Dave?”

“Yes,” I said. “I will. Definitely.”

I heard a long yawn, and a mumbled phrase that sounded like “See ya later, alligator,” and then I felt Wolf’s hand on my arm and he was leading me out of the dark room and shutting the door carefully behind him. We walked in silence down the wooden steps and the carpeted steps into the gloom of the living room. Evidently it was time to go. Maybe he didn’t want me to question him about that little game of his, up there in the dark. If he wished to be enigmatic, that was fine with me.

“She likes you,” he said at the front door, standing with his forearm up against the jamb and his other hand clasping his raised shoulder. He lowered his voice to say, “Don’t worry about anything.” “Okay,” I said, “I won’t,” and walked down the front steps to my bike, with its dented wire basket filled with books. I kicked up the stand, swung my leg over the seat, and gave a wave as I started down the winding drive. At the bend I glanced back at the house, rising in a kind of twilight, then whipped around to watch the shade-darkened drive as I rushed downhill between the high fence and the hedge, and when I burst onto the street I had to tighten my eyes in the sudden harsh light of the afternoon sun.

II

ADVENTURES IN THE DARK

All the way home, along hot streets printed with the curved shadows of telephone wires, I saw the high dark house, the cave of books, the black chamber. It all reminded me of something, and as I rode through the shade of the thruway overpass and broke into the sun it came to me: the darkness of the movie theater, the sun-striped lobby, the emergence into the glare of a summer afternoon. I had always liked that moment of confusion, when your mind is possessed by two worlds at once: the hard sidewalk with its anthills and its silver gum wrapper, the sword-fight in the high room with the crimson curtain. But soon the grainy sidewalk, the brilliant yellow fire hydrant, the flash of sun on the fender of a passing car, the jewel-green traffic light, become so vivid and exact that the other pictures grow dim, and you can hardly summon up the vague dark house, the book piles on the floor, the dim voice in the dark. I had the feeling that if I turned my bike around and rode back I’d find nothing at all — only a winding road lined with trees and a few dark posts with red reflectors.

At home I greeted my mother in the sunny kitchen, where she held up her hands to show me her flour-covered fingers and smoothed back a lock of hair with the back of a wrist. In my room I tossed my books on the bed and slumped down next to them with my neck against the wall and my legs dangling over the side. My wooden bookcase, painted a shiny gray, filled me with irritation. Here and there among the books were spaces given over to other things — old board games, a wooden box of chess pieces with a sliding top, two collections of stamps, a varnished bowl I had made in woodshop in the seventh grade. On top was my display of minerals, each with its label, and then came a globe on a brass stand, an electric clock with a visible cord, and a radiometer with vanes spinning in the light. Even the books exasperated me: they stood in neat rows, held tightly in place by green metal bookends with cork-lined bases.

On the beige wall and part of my bureau, long stripes of sunlight, thrown from the open slats of my blinds, lay tipped at an angle.

That night I woke in the dark. But I saw at once that it wasn’t dark: light from a streetlamp glimmered on the globe, on the leather edges of the blotter on my desk, on the metal curve of the shade of the floor lamp beside my reading chair. Suddenly I thought: The attic was empty, no one was there — and I fell asleep.

The next day I saw Wolf in English, French, and American History. I passed him twice in the halls, saw him leaving the cafeteria as I entered, and spoke with him briefly after school, checking my watch as we stood on a plot of brownish grass near the bridge that crossed the railroad tracks and led to the center of town. I had to get over to the library and work my two-hour shift. Wolf stood smoking a cigarette with his thumb hooked in his belt and his eyes narrowed against the updrifting bluish smoke. He said nothing about his house, nothing about Isabel, and as I walked down toward Main Street I felt a ripple of anger, as if something had been taken away from me. I could forgive the deception but not the silence. On the second floor of the library, where I stood removing books from a metal cart and studying the white Dewey decimal numbers on the back before placing the books on the shelves, I recalled his book-mad room and wondered whether I had fallen asleep there, in that stumpy armchair, and dreamed my visit to his invisible sister.

It was like that for the rest of the week: a few meetings in class, a few words after school. It was as if he’d invited me on an adventure and changed his mind. I felt like the victim of an unpleasant joke and vowed to stay out of his way. That weekend I set up my ping-pong table in the garage and called up my friends Ray and Dennis. My mother brought out glasses of lemonade heavy with ice cubes and we ate fistfuls of pretzel sticks and ran after the white ball as it rolled down the driveway toward the street, where kids from next door were playing Wiffle ball with a yellow plastic bat and a man with a strap around his waist stood leaning away from the top of a telephone pole. Afterward we sat on the screened back porch and played canasta on the green card table. On Monday I worked again at the library, and on Tuesday, a day off, Wolf invited me to his house.

It was still there at the top of the curving drive, less dark than I had remembered it, the clapboards distinctly white in the broken shade of the pines and Norway maples. As we walked through the living room toward the stairs, a tall handsome woman in khaki Bermuda shorts and a white halter entered from the kitchen, carrying a trowel in one hand and wearing on the other a grass-stained glove. I saw at once that she was Wolf’s mother — saw it by something in the cheekbones, in the eyes, in the air of careless authority with which she inhabited her body. She thrust the trowel into the gardening glove, reached out her long bare hand, and shook hands firmly. “I’m John’s mother,” she said. For a moment I wondered who John was. “Sorry for the mess. You must be David.”

“He is, and then again he isn’t,” Wolf said, and throwing an arm across her shoulders he added, “What mess?” As she turned to him with a look of loving exasperation, she raised the back of her hand to her temple and smoothed away a piece of dark hair — and suddenly I imagined a world of mothers with hands dipped in work, raising their wrists gracefully to smooth back their hair.

In his room with the drawn shades he sat in the legless armchair with his feet up on the bed, while I lay across the bed with my neck against the wall, one foot on the floor and one ankle resting on my knee. He spoke only about Isabel. She was shy, extremely shy — hence the meeting in the dark. Whenever she met someone new — an ordeal she preferred to avoid — she insisted on the condition of absolute darkness. Thick curtains hung over the windows of the attic room. But don’t worry — when she got to know me better, when she got used to me, he was sure she’d come out of the dark. Besides, she didn’t only stay in her room — sometimes she came down for dinner or walked around the house. It was only strangers who made her nervous. He appreciated my willingness to visit her, she needed to see people, god did she need to see people, though not just any old moronic people. As soon as he’d met me, he’d been sure. Truth was, about a year ago she’d had some kind of — well, they called it a breakdown, though in his opinion her nervous system had discovered a brilliant way of allowing her to do whatever she wanted without having to suffer the boredom of good old high school and all the rest of the famous teenage routine. She hadn’t attended school for the last year, but the board of education had allowed her to study at home and take the tests in her room. She was much more studious than he was, always memorizing French irregular verbs and the parts of earthworms. She was a year younger than we were. He himself would love to have a nice little breakdown, to use that word, though frankly he’d prefer to call it a fix-up, but he suffered from an embarrassing case of perfect health, he couldn’t even manage to catch a cold, something must be wrong with him.

Wolf reached under his chair, brought up a pack of cigarettes, and held it out to me with raised eyebrows. He shrugged, thrust one into his mouth, and lit up. “It all depends on how you define health,” he said. He drew the smoke deep into his lungs and, raising his chin so that his face was nearly horizontal, blew a slow stream of smoke toward the ceiling. When he was done he raised a shade, opened the window, and made little brushing motions with his hands toward the screen. He blew at the screen with short quick bursts of breath. Then he shut the window and jerked down the shade.

He turned to face me, leaning back against the window frame with his hands in his pockets and his ankles crossed.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” he asked.

It wasn’t a question I was expecting. “Yes and no,” I finally said.

“Brilliant answer,” Wolf said, with his slow lazy smile. He pushed with his shoulders against the window frame and stood up. “Shall we?” He nodded toward the door.

I followed him up the wooden steps into the sun-streaked dark attic. In the little hall he whispered, “She’s expecting you.” At the last door he knocked with his hand held sideways, using a single knuckle. He opened the door — in the dim light of the hall I caught sight of the edge of a bureau with a shadowy hairbrush on top — and a moment later I was in utter darkness. He led me to the high-backed chair, and as I sat upright against the stiff back and gripped the chair arms, I felt like the wooden carving of a king.

“Welcome, stranger,” the voice said. It seemed to be coming from a few feet away, as if from someone sitting up in bed. “What brings you to these parts?” I had the feeling that Wolf was staring at me in the dark.

“I was looking for the post office,” I said.

“This here’s the ’lectric company, mister,” Isabel said.

The black room, the stiff chair, the word “’lectric,” the sense that I was being tested in some way, all this made me break into a sharp, nervous laugh.

I could feel Wolf rising from his chair. “I’ll be in my room. Just ring if you need anything.” I heard his footsteps on the rug. The door opened and closed quickly.

“Did he say ‘ring’?”

“I’ve got a bell.”

“Oh — your Isa-bell.”

“Do you always make jokes?”

“Only in the dark.”

“And when it gets light?”

“Dead serious.”

“Lucky it’s dark. Let’s play a game.”

“In the dark?”

“You’ll see.”

I tried to imagine some mad game of Monopoly, in which you had to select your piece by touch, trying to distinguish the ship from the car, then rolled the dice across an invisible board and carefully felt their smooth sides to find the slightly recessed dots. I was wondering how I might contrive to move my piece along an unseen board when I felt something soft against my fingers and snatched my hand away.

“Here,” Isabel said. “Tell me what it is. You can only use one hand.”

I reached out my hand and felt a soft pressure against the palm. I closed my fingers over something furry or fuzzy and roundish, with a hardness under the fur. On one side the fur gave way to a smoothness of cloth. It felt familiar, this roundish furryish thing about the size of my palm, but though I kept turning it over and stroking it with my thumb, I couldn’t figure it out.

“Give up?” she said. “Actually, I should have told you — it’s part of something.”

“Is it part of a stuffed animal?”

“Well, no. Close. Actually — you’ll kill me — it’s an earmuff. It came off that metal thing that goes over your head.”

She next passed me an object that was hard and thin and cool, which immediately shaped itself against my fingers as a teaspoon.

“That was way too easy,” I said.

“Well, I felt guilty. Try this one.”

It was small and curved, with a clip of some sort attached to it, and suddenly I knew: a barrette. There followed a hard leathery object that was easy — an eyeglass case — and then a mysterious cloth strip with tassels that turned out to be a bookmark, and then a papery spongy object with a string attached that I triumphantly identified as a tea bag. Once, as she passed me a small glass object, I felt against the underside of my fingers the light pressure of her fingertips. And once, after a pause in which I heard sounds as of shifting cloth, she let fall into my outstretched hand a longish piece of fabric that she immediately snatched away, saying “That wasn’t fair,” bursting into a laugh at my protest, and refusing to identify it, even as I imagined her slipping back into a shirt or pajama top.

After the touching game she asked me to describe my room. I told her about my bookcase, my armchair with the sagging cushion, and my wall lamp that could be pulled out on a fold-up metal contraption, but she kept asking for more details. “I can’t see anything,” she said, sounding exasperated. I tried to make her see the X-shaped crosspieces of the unfolding wall lamp over my bed, and then I described, with fanatical care, the six-sided quartz crystal, the pale purple fluorite crystal in the shape of a tetrahedron, and the amethyst geode in my mineral collection. When it was her turn, she described a cherrywood box on her desk, with four compartments. One held a small pouch of blue felt tied with leather thongs and containing a silver dollar and an Indian-head penny, the second held a pair of short red-handled scissors, the third a set of tortoiseshell barrettes, and the fourth a small yellowish ivory figurine, a Chinese sage seated with his legs crossed and holding an open book in his lap. One of his hands was broken off at the wrist, he wore a broad-brimmed conical hat, the ivory pages of the book were wavy — and as she described the ivory man in the compartment of the cherrywood box, I seemed to see, taking shape in the darkness, a faint and tremulous Chinese sage, hovering at the height of my head.

We were playing Ghost when I was startled by a knock at the door. Quickly the door opened and closed; I was aware of a momentary change in the quality of blackness but saw nothing. “It’s nearly five-thirty,” Wolf said — he knew I was expected home by six. “See you, stranger,” Isabel said as Wolf led me toward the door. Downstairs I greeted his mother, who was standing in the living room with her arms reaching up to the top of a drooping curtain. When she turned to look at me, keeping one hand on the curtain and waving the fingers of her other hand, I saw that her mouth was full of safety pins.

I now began to visit Wolf’s house after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when I was free of the library, and on weekend afternoons. I would climb the stairs to Wolf’s room, where we talked for a while, and then he would rise from the chair or bed very slowly, as if he were being tugged back by a tremendous force, and lead me up to the attic. At the door of Isabel’s room he knocked with one knuckle, lightly, twice. Without waiting for a reply, he held open the door and closed it quickly behind me before returning to his room. If he cared that I was spending less time with him than with his sister, he never showed it. If anything, he seemed eager for me to visit her — it was as if he thought I might cure her in some way. Exactly what it all meant I didn’t know, couldn’t care. I knew only that I needed to visit Isabel, to be with her in that room. The darkness excited me — I could feel it seize me and draw me in. Everything in me seemed to quicken there.

The darkness, the hidden face, the secret room, the unseeing of Isabel — it all soon came to feel as much a part of her as her voice. If I tried to picture her, I saw a wavering shadowy image that hardened gradually into a tall girl in Bermuda shorts, holding a trowel. Sometimes, before she faded away, I saw gray, amused eyes — Wolf’s eyes. She loved games, all sorts of games, and it occurred to me that one thing we were doing in that room was playing the game of darkness. She was like a child who closes her eyes, stretches out her arms, and pretends to be blind. For all I knew, she might really be blind — she might really be anything. Whatever she was, I had to go there, to the dark at the top of the house.

In one of our kitchen drawers, the one to the right of the silverware drawer, there were two flashlights, a regular one and a very small one, the size of a fountain pen. One day not long after my first visit, I slipped the small flashlight into my pocket and carried it with me into the darkness of Isabel’s room. My plan was to take it out during one of our games, fiddle with it, and shine it suddenly and briefly, as if by accident, at Isabel. She would spring into existence — at last! — if only for a second, before vanishing into the hidden world. I would apologize and we would continue as before.

As I sat in the stiff chair, holding the little flashlight and listening to Isabel tell me about a new word game she’d invented, I kept waiting for the right moment. I could hear her shifting in the bed — I imagined her moving her arms about as she talked. Then I imagined her sleeves, perhaps pajama sleeves, slipping back along her gesturing forearms. At that instant my desire to see her, to strip her of darkness, became so ferocious that I raised my fingertips to my throat and felt the thudding of my blood. I imagined her startled eyes, brilliant with fear. It seemed to me that to shine the light at Isabel, to expose her to my greedy gaze, would be like tearing off her clothes. With a feeling of shame, of sorrow, and of something that felt like gratitude, I returned the light to my pocket.

And settling into the chair, as the afternoon’s deep night flowed into me, I wondered at my ignorance; for I saw that what held me there was the darkness, the lure of an unseen, mysterious world.

Meanwhile, in the unmysterious world outside Wolfland, I burst out laughing in the cafeteria, raised my hand in American History, banged my locker shut. I shelved books in the library, drank cherry Cokes at Lucy’s Luncheonette, and went miniature golfing on Friday nights with Ray and Dennis, while cars rolled by on the Post Road with their windows open and tough-looking boys with slicked-back hair slapped their hands on car tops to blasts of rock ’n’ roll. At every moment I felt invaded by Isabel, but at the same time I had trouble remembering her exactly, in the world beyond her room. The sunlit realm kept threatening to make a ghost of her, or to erase her entirely, and I began to look forward to the coming of night, when she grew more vivid in my mind.

One Saturday morning as I was walking in town, on my way to buy a birthday card for a girl in my French class, I was shocked to see Isabel strolling out of Mancini’s drugstore. Her dark hair, cut short, was held back by a glossy barrette, and her short-sleeved white blouse was tucked into her jeans, which were rolled up to midcalf. A navy-blue pocketbook, slung over her left shoulder, kept bumping against her right hip. Although I knew that Isabel never left her house, that I had allowed a scattering of details, which must have been collecting in my mind, to attach themselves to this stranger strolling out of Mancini’s drugstore, still my heart beat hard, my breath came quick, and not until later that afternoon, when I climbed the wooden stairs, did I grow calm in the rich blackness of Isabel’s chamber.

Sometimes when I sat with her in the dark I wondered whether she was deformed in some way. I imagined a twisted mouth, a smashed nose, a mulberry birthmark spreading like a stain across her face. As a ghost-swarm of ugly Isabels rose in my mind, I felt repelled not so much by the images as by something in myself that was creating them, and as if in protest another kind of Isabel began to appear, blue-eyed Isabels and smiling Isabels, Isabels in red shorts, Isabels in faded jeans with a dark blue patch in back where a pocket had torn off, Isabels in white bathing suits wiping their glistening arms with beach towels, until my brain was so filled with false Isabels that I pressed my hands against the sides of my head, as if to crush them to death.

One night I thought: The blackness is a poison that soaks into my skin and makes me insane. During these seizures I have delusions that I call Isabel. The thought interested me, excited me, as if I had found the solution to a difficult problem in trigonometry, but as the night wore on, the idea grew less and less interesting until it left me feeling bored and indifferent.

One afternoon as we were playing the game of objects, Isabel said, “Now hold out your hand palm up, this is a tricky one.” I was instantly alert; something in her voice betrayed a secret excitement. Holding out my hand as she had instructed, I heard some movement on the bed. A moment later I felt a softly hard, heavyish object lowered slowly onto my palm. A confusion came over me, I began to close my fingers over it, suddenly there was a wild laugh near my ear and she snatched the strange object away, crying, “Couldn’t you guess? Couldn’t you guess?” but I had already recognized, lying for a moment in the palm of my hand, Isabel’s warm forearm.

As the evenings became hotter, I found it difficult to sit at my desk doing homework in the light of my twin-bulb fluorescent lamp. I had always found it pleasing and even soothing to complete homework assignments: the carefully numbered answers, the crisp sound of turned pages, the red and yellow and green index tabs, the clean white notebook paper with its orderly rows of blue lines and the pale red line running down the side. Now it all irritated me, as if I were being distracted from the real business of life. Through the screens of my partly open windows I could hear the sounds of my neighborhood at dusk: low voices in a nearby yard, the rising and falling hum of a distant lawnmower, dishes clinking from an open window, the slam of a car door, a girl’s high laughter. I began memorizing the sounds and collecting new ones, so that I could report them to Isabel: footsteps in another room, which might be my father going into the kitchen for a box of crackers or my mother coming in from the back porch; the sound of a garage door being lowered; the wheels of a passing bicycle rustling in the sand at the side of the street. The sounds pleased me, because I could bring them to Isabel, but at the same time they disturbed me, for it was as if the world that separated me from Isabel were growing thicker and more impenetrable as I listened.

At night I kept waking up and falling asleep, as Isabels tumbled through my mind. In the mornings I felt sluggish and heavy-headed, and sometimes during the day I would catch my mother looking at me in the way she did when I was coming down with something.

One afternoon toward the middle of June, Isabel seemed a little distracted. It was hot in the attic room and the darkness seemed thick and soft, like wool. I could hear her shifting about on the bed, and then I heard another sound, as of fingers stroking cloth, but silkier. “What are you doing, Isabel?” “Oh, brushing my hair.” I imagined the brush I’d half glimpsed on the bureau as it pulled its way through stretched-out hair that kept changing from dark to blond to reddish brown. I heard the clunk of what I thought must be a brush on a table and suddenly she said, “Would you like to see my room?” My hands clutched the arms of the chair — I imagined a burst of light, like a blow to my forehead. Isabel laughed; her laughter sounded cruel; I knew nothing about this girl in the dark, who was suddenly going to reveal herself to me in some violent way; I could feel an Isabel rising in my mind, but her head was the head of some girl in my English class, which faded away and was replaced by another head; something touched my arm. “Get up,” her voice said, very close to me.

Holding my wrist in her hand, she led me through the dark and placed my hand on cool wood surfaces, roundish knobs, soft protuberances, velvety edges. Images of drawers and padded seats and velvet jewel boxes floated in my mind. After a while I felt against my palm the familiar back of my upholstered chair with its row of metal buttons. “Is the tour over, Isabel?” “One more item of interest.” She took a step and, still holding my wrist, placed my hand on a rumpled softness that felt like a sheet. “Tour over,” she said, and released my wrist. I heard a creak, a rustling, silence.

“So how do you like my room?” she asked, in a voice that came from the other end of the bed.

“It’s very — it’s very—,” I said, searching for the exact word.

“You probably ought to lie down, you know. If you’re tired.”

I climbed tensely onto the bed, pressing my knees into the mattress, and began crawling across it toward her voice. “Nnnn!” I said, snatching my hand away as something moved out of reach. The bed seemed long, longer than the entire room, though I was moving so slowly that I was almost motionless. “Are you there?” I said to the dark. Isabel said nothing. I patted about: a pillow, another pillow, a sheet, a turned-back spread. “Where are you?” I asked the dark. “Here,” she whispered, so close that I could feel her breath against my ear. I reached out and felt empty air. “I can’t see you, Isabel.” Deep in the room I heard a burst of laughter. “Can you fly, Isabel? Is that your secret?” I listened to the room. “Are you anywhere?” Still kneeling on the bed, but raising my upper body, like a rearing horse, I swept out both hands, my fingertips fluttering about, stroking the dark. From the pillow and sheets came a fresh, slightly soapy scent. I lay down on my stomach, pressing my cheek into a pillow and inhaling the scent of Isabel. In the darkness I closed my eyes. Somewhere I heard a sound, as of a foot knocking against a piece of furniture. Then I felt a pushing-down in the mattress. Something hard pressed against the side of my arm. I felt the hardness with my fingertips and suddenly understood that I was touching a face. It pulled away. “Isabel,” I said. “Isabel, Isabel, Isabel.” Nothing was there. In the thick darkness I felt myself dissolving, turning into black mist, spreading into the farthest reaches of the room.

III

REVELATION

On a brilliant afternoon in July, under a sky so blue that it seemed to have weight, the beach towels on the sand reminded me of the rectangles of color in a child’s paint box. Here and there a slanted beach umbrella partly shaded a blanket. Under the wide umbrellas, thermos jugs and cooler chests and half-open picnic baskets stood among yellow water wings and green sea monsters. On my striped towel, in the fierce sun, I leaned back on both elbows and stared off past my ankle bones at the place where the rippling dry sand changed to flat and wet. Low waves broke slowly in uneven lines. The water moved partway up the beach and slid back, leaving a dark shine that quickly vanished.

People were walking about, sitting up on blankets, running in and out of the water. A tall girl with a blond ponytail and coppery glistening legs came walking along the wet sand. Her bathing suit was so white that it looked freshly painted. Her sticking-out breasts looked hard and sharp, like funnels. A small rubber football flew spinning through the bright blue air. In the sand a gull walked stiffly and half lifted its wings. Down in the shallow water a thick-chested senior in a tight bathing suit crouched on his hands and knees, so that I could see the blond hairs glowing on his lower spine — suddenly a lanky junior with hard-muscled legs came running down the beach into the water, flung his hands onto the back of his kneeling friend, and flipped gracefully into the air, landing in the water with a splash. Tilted bottles of soda gleamed here and there in the sand beside beach towels, a girl in a turquoise two-piece stood by the foot of the lifeguard stand, looking up and shading her eyes, and high in the sky a yellow helicopter seemed stuck in the thick blue heavy summer air.

Laughing, whooping, running their hands through their wet hair, Ray and Dennis came striding toward me, kicking up bursts of sand. They picked up their towels and stood rubbing their chests and arms. Water streamed from their bathing suits.

“So guess who I ran into down by the jetty,” Ray said, laying out his towel carefully in the sand. “Joyce. She said Vicky thinks you’re mad at her.” He threw himself facedown on the towel.

“I’m not mad at her. I just want — I just need—”

“Ah just want,” Dennis said, holding up his hands as if they were poised over a guitar. “Ah just need.” He strummed the guitar.

Summer had come, season of sweet loafing. I spent long hours lying on the beach, playing ping-pong in my shady garage, and reading on the screened back porch, where thin stripes of sun and shade fell across my book from the bamboo blinds. Even my job at the library seemed a lazy sort of half-dreaming, as I wheeled my cart slowly between high dim shelves pierced by spears of sun. But as I lay on the beach running my fingers through the warm sand, as I bent over to retrieve a ping-pong ball from a cluster of broken-toothed rakes and shiny red badminton poles rusting at the bottom, all the time I was waiting for Isabel. She slept until one or two in the afternoon. No one was allowed to visit her till the middle of the day. Wolf himself never rose before noon and seemed amused at what he called my peculiar habits. “The early bird catches the worm,” he said, “but who wants the worm?” I found myself rising later and later in the morning, but there were always hours of sunshine to get through before I arrived in the dark.

“Up so soon?” my father said, glancing at me over the tops of his eyeglasses as he bent toward his lunch in the sunny kitchen.

Sometimes, to pass the time, I took long drives with Ray and Dennis, when Dennis could borrow his mother’s car. My plan had been to get my license as soon as school was out, but I woke each day feeling tired and kept putting it off. We would drive along the thruway until we saw the name of some little town we didn’t know. Then we drove all over that town, passing through the business district with its brick bank trimmed in white and its glass-fronted barbershop with the slow-turning reflection of a striped pole before heading out to the country lanes with their lonely mailboxes and their low stone walls, and ended up having lunch at some diner where you could get twenty-two kinds of pancake and the maple syrup came in glass containers shaped like smiling bears. Dennis wore sunglasses and drove with one wrist resting on the wheel. In his lamplit room with the drawn shades, Wolf had told me how he’d taken the written test six months ago without once opening the boring manual. “And?” I asked. He smiled, raised a finger, and drew it across his throat.

And at last I made my way up the wooden stairs and disappeared in the dark. “Isabel,” I would say, standing by the chair, “are you awake?” Or: “Isabel, are you there?” Sometimes I felt a touch on my arm and I would reach out, saying, “Isabel? Is that you?” as my hand grasped at air. Then I would hear her laughing quietly from the bed or across the room or just behind me or who knew where. She would say, “Welcome, stranger,” or “Lo, the traveler returns,” or nothing at all. Then I would make my way over to the bed and pat my way along the side and lie down, hoping for a fleeting touch, hoping she would be there.

I visited her every day. When I wasn’t working at the library, I rode my bike to her house at three in the afternoon; in Isabel’s room I would forget the other world so completely that sometimes when I came downstairs I was startled to see the lamps in the living room glowing bright yellow. Through the front window I could see the porch light shining on black leaves. Then I would phone my parents with apologies and ride my bike home to a reheated dinner, while my mother looked at me with her worried expression and my father asked if I’d ever happened to hear of a clever little invention called the wristwatch. At night I could hear my mother and father talking about me in low voices, as if there were something wrong with me.

On the three afternoons a week I worked at the library, I would ride over to Wolf’s house after dinner and not return until after midnight. Sometimes Wolf’s mother, who liked to stay up late watching old movies on a little ten-inch television in the darkened living room, offered to drive me home. I would sit with her on the couch for a while, watching a snippet of black-and-white movie: an unshaven man in a rumpled suit stumbling along a dusty street in a Mexican town, a woman in a phone booth frantically dialing as she looked about in terror. Then I would load my bike into the trunk of the car and sit with Wolf’s mother in front. On the way to my house, along dark streets that glowed now and then under the yellow light of a streetlamp, she would talk about Wolf: he’d failed three subjects, could you believe it, he was smart as a whip but had always hated school, she was worried about him, I was a good influence. Then with her long fingers she would light up a cigarette, and in the dark car streaked with passing lights I would see her eyes — Wolf’s eyes — narrow against the upstreaming smoke.

At times it seemed to me that I inhabited two worlds: a sunny and boring day-world that had nothing to do with Isabel, and a rich night-world that was all Isabel. I soon saw that this division was false. The summer night itself, compared with Isabel’s world, was a place of light: the yellow windows of houses, the glow of streetlamps, the porch lights, the headlights of passing cars, the ruby taillights, the white summer moon in the deep blue sky. No, the real division was between the visible world and that other world, where Isabel waited for me like a dark dream.

One afternoon as I stood by the chair I felt something press against my foot. “Isabel, is that you?” In the blackness I listened, then bent over the bed. I patted the covers and began crawling across, all the way to the pillows, but Isabel wasn’t there. I heard a small laugh, which seemed to come from the floor. Carefully stepping from the bed I kneeled on the carpet, lifted the spread, and peered into blackness, as if I were looking for a cat. “Come on, Isabel,” I said, “I know you’re there,” and reached my hand under. I felt something furry against my fingers and snatched my hand away. I heard a dim sound, the furry thing pressed into my arm — and closing my hand over it, I drew out from under the bed an object that wasn’t a kitten. From the top of the bed Isabel said, “Did you find what you were looking for, David Dave?” but ignoring her I pressed the thick, furry slipper against my face.

Sometimes I tried to imagine her in the world of light. She lay next to me on the beach, on her own towel, with a thin line of sand in between — and though I could see, in my mind, that thin line of sand, and the ribbed white towel with a blue eyeglass case in one corner and a bottle of suntan lotion in another, though I could see a depression in the towel where she had kneeled, and a glitter of sand scattered across one corner, though I could see, or almost see, a wavering above the towel, a trembling of air, as if the atmosphere were thickening, I could not see Isabel.

But in the dark there was only Isabel. She would touch me and vanish — a laughing ghost. Sometimes, for an instant, my fingers grazed some part of her. She allowed me to lie down on the bed beside her but not to reach out. I could hear her breathing next to me, and along my side I could feel, like a faint exhalation, her nearby side, so close that my arm-hairs bristled. These were the rules of the game, if it was a game — I didn’t care, felt only a kind of feverish calm. I needed to be there, needed the dark, the games, the adventure, the kingdom of her room. I needed — I didn’t know what. But it was as if I were more myself in that room than anywhere else. Outside, in the light, where everything stood revealed, I was somehow hidden away. In Isabel’s dark domain, I lived inside out.

Meanwhile I was getting up later and later. One day after lunch my mother said to me, “You’re looking tired, Davy. This friend of yours…Wouldn’t it be better if you stayed home today?” And looking anxiously at me she placed on my forehead the cool backs of her fingers.

“Don’t,” I said, jerking my head away.

One afternoon I found Isabel in the dark. Instead of walking to the right of my chair, as I usually did, I changed my mind at the last moment and walked to the left — and suddenly I stumbled against her, where she’d been crouching or lying, and I fell. I disentangled myself in a great flailing rush, and as I did so I felt for an instant, against my ribs, a slippery silky material that slid over something soft that suddenly vanished.

Because she had asked me about the beach, I began to bring her things: a smooth stone, a mussel shell, the claw of a small crab. I collected impressions for her, too, like the dark shine of the sand as the waves slid back, or the tilted bottles of soda beside the beach towels. The soda itself looked tilted, against the slanted glass, but was actually level with the sand. She always wanted to see more — the exact shape of a wave, the pattern of footprints in a sandbar — and I felt myself becoming a connoisseur of sensations, an artist of the world of light.

But what I longed for was the dark room, the realm, the mystery of Isabel-land. There, the other world dissolved in a solution of black. There, all was pleasure, strangeness, and a kind of sensual promise that drifted in the air like a dark perfume.

“Do you know what this is?” she said. “One hand. Come on. Guess.”

In my palm I felt a soft, slinky thing, which filled my hand slowly, as if lowered from a height.

“Is it a scarf?” I said, rubbing it with my thumb as it spilled over the sides of my hand.

“A scarf!” she said, bursting into wild laughter.

One day Dennis said to me, “So what’s with you and Vicky?” We were sitting on my front steps, watching people on the way to the beach, with their towels and radios.

“Nothing’s with me and Vicky.”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “Jesus.”

Sometimes I had the sense that Isabel was revealing herself to me slowly, like a gradually materializing phantom, according to a plan that eluded me. If I waited patiently, it would all become clear, as if things were moving toward some larger revelation.

“You’re so good for me,” she said, whispering near my ear. I felt her hand squeeze my hand. In the dark I smelled a faint soapy scent and a more tangy, fleshy odor. When I reached out I felt her pillow beside me, still warm from her head.

On the beach one day as I lay thinking of Isabel, I overheard a girl saying, “…August already and he hasn’t even sent me one single solitary…” Something about those words troubled me. As I pressed my chest and stomach against the hard-soft sand under my towel, trying to capture, for Isabel, the precise sensation of hard and soft, it came to me: what troubled me was the knowledge that time was passing, that it was already August — August, the second half of summer, August, the deceitful month. Still the hot days seem to stretch on and on, just as they did in July, but you know that instead of a new summer month shimmering in the distance, there’s no longer any protection from September — and you can almost see, far off in the summery haze, the first breath-clouds forming in the brisk autumn air.

It was about this time that I noticed a little change in Isabel. She was growing restless — or perhaps she was only searching for a new game. Now when I arrived she was almost never in bed, but was somewhere else in the room, standing or moving about. One afternoon when I entered the dark I could hear her in an unfamiliar place. “Where are you?” I said. “Over here. Be done in a sec.” I heard a wooden sliding, a creak, a rustling, a slide and thump, as of a closed drawer. There was a ripply, cloth-y sound, a snap, more rustling. “There!” Isabel said. “You can come over now.” I advanced slowly, holding out an arm. “Sorry!” I said, and snatched my hand away. “Fresh!” said Isabel. “So! How do you like it?” She seized my wrist and placed my hand on her upper arm and then for a moment on her hip. “It’s a new dress,” she said. “Stockings, too. Or scarves, according to some people.” I heard scritch-scratchy sounds, as if she were rubbing her knees together. “So! Can you dance?” A hand grasped my hand and set it on her waist. On the fingers of my other hand I felt the grope of a closing hand. Fingers seized my waist. “One two three one two three!” she chanted, as she began to waltz in the dark — and I, who had taken dance lessons in the eighth grade, led her round and round as she hummed “The Vienna Waltz,” till she smacked into something and cried, “Don’t stop!”—and as I turned round and round in that room, knocking into things that fell over, I felt her hair tickling my face, I smelled a faint perfume that made me think of oboes and bassoons, I pressed my fingers against the hard, rippling small of her back as she hummed louder and louder and something went rolling across the room and burst against a wall.

Because the bed was almost always empty, I no longer hesitated by the chair. Instead I went straight past it and lay down on my back with my head on a pillow and waited for her to present herself. After a while she would greet me and sit down on the chair with her feet on the bed. Then she would talk to me about her plans for the future — she wanted to be a doctor, she wanted to help people, she wanted to travel — while I lay in the dark and tried to imagine Isabel stepping from an airplane, in some bright airport, somewhere.

It was during one of these afternoons in early August, when she sat in the chair with her bare feet resting near my lower leg, that she told me about an idea she’d been turning over in her mind. She’d been thinking about it, actually, for a long time, though she hadn’t been ready to face it, really. But now, thanks to me, she felt she had the courage to do it. Of course, it wasn’t the sort of thing you would just go ahead and do without giving it a whole lot of thought — you had to sort of sneak up on it, in your mind. And that’s just what she’d been doing, over these last weeks, and it felt right, so right, it really did. And so, to make a long story short, or a short story long, she was going to break out of the dark — let in the light — before the month was over.

A moment later she said, “You’re not saying anything.”

I said, “Are you really sure you—”

“Absolutely,” Isabel said.

Now whenever I entered she was full of plans. At first she’d thought to change things gradually — a dim candle at one end of the room, then on my next visit a lamp on the bed table, and finally the opened curtains — but the more she thought about it, the more she liked the idea of announcing the new era dramatically. A complete break — that was the way to go. And once the darkness was gone, why, she could do anything — anything. She felt it in her bones. She’d always wanted to learn how to play tennis, for example, and had foolishly put it off. She wanted to see people, do things. She missed her aunt in Maine. She and I could go rowing together — there must be lakes around here. We could go swimming at that beach of mine. And as I lay back against the pillows, listening to her as she sat on the chair with her legs on the bed, I could feel her kicking her heels in excitement.

One afternoon as I climbed the carpeted stairs, on my way to the wooden stairs that led to the attic, it struck me that I hadn’t seen Wolf for quite some time. I had visited him occasionally, on the way to Isabel’s room, but not for the past few weeks or so, and I felt a sudden desire to see him now. I knocked on his door with a single knuckle — two light raps — and after a pause I heard the word “Enter,” uttered in a tone of mock solemnity.

I pushed open the door and saw in the mildly sunny room a big new desk against one wall. Wolf was sitting at it with his back to me, bent over a notebook. The shades had been replaced by white blinds, and through the open slats I saw sun-struck green leaves and bits of blue sky. The tall narrow bookcase was still there, fastened upright against the wall, but the stray piles of books were gone, in place of the sunken chair stood a red leather armchair with a red leather hassock, the room had an air of studious neatness.

Wolf turned to glance over his shoulder. When he saw me he frowned and then slowly began to smile; as his smile became fixed, his frown gradually lessened without disappearing entirely. With a flourish he indicated the red leather armchair.

As I walked over to it, he jerked his thumb at the desk. “The new dispensation.” He shrugged. “It’s very interesting. They want me to do well in school, but they think I read too much. Books as the enemy. Hence our new friend here. I call him Fred.” He patted the desk as if it were a big, friendly dog. “They think it’s good for my — what was that word they used? Oh yes: character.”

I sat down in the new chair, placing one leg on the hassock, while Wolf half rose and swung around in his wooden chair so that he straddled it, facing me. His crossed forearms rested on the back. On the bed I noticed a new plaid spread.

“And what have you been up to, David Dave?” he asked, looking at me with his air of amusement.

“Oh, you know. The library. Ping-pong. Nothing much. You?”

He shrugged a single shoulder. “The salt mines.” He nodded toward the desk. “Summer school. Punishment for dereliction of duty. Have I mentioned that I flunked three subjects? A family secret.”

I lowered my eyes.

“And look at this neat little number.” He swung an arm back to the desk and held up a booklet. “Driver’s manual. From the Department of Motor Vehicles, with love.” He tossed it back. “My father was very clear. Failure will no longer be tolerated.” He shrugged again. “They think I’m a bad influence on myself.” Wolf smiled. “They want me to be more like — well, like you.”

“Me!”

“Sure, why not? Straight A’s, the good life, all that jazz. A solid citizen.”

“They’re wrong,” I said quietly, and then: “Don’t be like me!” It came out like a cry.

“If you say so,” he said, after a pause.

We sat for a while in silence. I looked at the big pale desk, with its shiny black fluorescent light and its green blotter in a dark leatherish frame, at the new plaid bedspread, at the clean bright blinds.” Well then,” I said, “I guess—” and rose to go. Wolf said nothing. At the door I turned to look back at him, and he gave me that slow lazy smile, with its little touch of mockery.

In the darkness of Isabel’s chamber her plans were taking shape. The great event would take place on the last day of August, three days before the start of school. I lay on the bed remembering the first time I had entered the room; it seemed a long time ago. “Isabel,” I said, “do you remember—” “Are you listening?” she said sharply, and for a moment I did not know what she was talking about.

One night I woke and saw Isabel very clearly. She was wearing white shorts and a bright red short-sleeved blouse. She was leaning back on both hands, with her legs stretched out and her face tilted back, her hair bound in a ponytail and her mouth radiantly smiling. Her face was vague, except for the smile, with its perfectly shaped small white teeth and its thin line of glistening pink between the bright teeth and the upper lip. I fell asleep, and when I woke again I saw the same image, sharp and bright, and understood instantly where it had come from: I saw the dentist’s waiting room, the sunny glass table with the magazines, the glossy page advertising a special brand of toothpaste that whitened as it cleaned.

In the last days of August I had the sense of a distant brightness advancing, like an ancient army in a movie epic, the sun flashing on the polished helmets and on the tips of the upraised swords.

On the day before the final day, I said to Isabel, “Come over here.” My voice startled me with its harshness, its tone of aggrieved authority. There was silence in the dark. Then I felt, in the mattress, the pressure of a form, as she climbed onto the bed and settled down beside me. “It’ll be all right,” she whispered. “You’ll see.” I could feel her like a heat along my side. My cheek itched, as if tickled by Isabel’s hair or perhaps by a high ripple in the rumpled spread. My eyes were wide open. Images rose up and drifted away: a Chinese sage reading a book, bursts of sunlight on shady clapboards, a gray jacket hanging on a hook.

On the morning of the last day of August I woke unusually early. Even my parents were still asleep. I drank a glass of orange juice in the bright kitchen, tried to read on the back porch, and at last decided to go to the beach. As I stepped onto the sand I was surprised to see a scattering of people, standing about or lying on towels, and I wondered whether they were there because they had stayed all night. The tide was in. Over the water the sky was so blue that it reminded me of an expensive shirt I had seen in a department store. I laid out my towel, with my bottle of suntan lotion in one corner and my book in another, and then I set off on a walk along the wet sand by the low waves. Farther out the water solidified into patches of deep purplish blue and streaks of silver. In the shiny dark sand I saw my footprints, which stood out pale for a moment before the dark wetness soaked back. I tried to imagine a second pair of footprints walking beside mine, first pale and then dark, vanishing in the frilly-edged sheets of water thrown forward by the breaking waves. People were arriving at the beach, carrying towels and radios. Far up on the sand, a girl sat up, poured lotion into her hand, and began caressing her arm slowly, stretching it out and turning it back and forth. When I reached the jetty I walked out onto the rocks, sat for a while on the warm stone with my legs in the water, then swam out until I was tired. Back on my towel I lay down and felt the sun burning off the waterdrops. A girl from my French class waved to me and I waved back. Families with beach umbrellas were coming over the crest of sand by the parking lot. The beach was filling up.

I arrived at Isabel’s house toward three in the afternoon. At the door Wolf’s mother appeared in green shorts and a yellow halter, with a pocketbook over her shoulder and car keys hanging from her hand. “Go on in,” she said, “I’m in a rush,” and hurried down the steps. In the driveway she turned and called, “John’s out. She’s expecting you.” I passed through the cool dim living room, climbed the carpeted steps to the second floor, and looked at the familiar hall with its closed doors before climbing into the attic. At the top of the stairs I passed through the sun-striped darkness into the second hall and quietly entered Isabel’s chamber.

“Oh there you are,” she said, with a mixture of impatience and excitement.

“I went to the beach,” I said, looking around at the dark. Parts of it were more familiar than others — the part that held the chair, the part that held the bed — and I wondered if I could memorize the different parts by concentrating my attention.

“I’m very excited!” cried Isabel, and I heard her do a little dance-step on the carpet.

Slowly I walked over to the bed and lay down.

“What are you doing, what are you doing?” Isabel said, stamping her foot.

“Doing? Just lying here, Isabel, thinking how peaceful it is. You know, I went for a swim this morning and I’m—”

“You’re such a tease!” she cried. “You can’t just lie there,” she said, much closer, and I felt a tug at my sleeve. “You have to get up.”

“Isabel, listen. Do you really—”

“Oh what are you talking about? Come on! Come on!” She tugged again and I followed her into the dark. I could feel her excitement like a wind. She drew me across the room and abruptly stopped. I could hear her patting the curtains, groping for the drawstrings. The curtains sounded thick and softly solid, like the side of an immense animal. I imagined the brilliant light outside, raised like a sword. “There!” Isabel said. I heard her tugging, jerking stubbornly, moving her hand about, like a maddened bird trapped in the folds. Something gave way, the top of the curtains began to pull apart, sunlight burst through like a shout, for an instant I saw the slowly separating dark-blue folds, a swirl of glowing golden dust, an edge of raised sleeve, before I flung a hand over my eyes. Thrusting out the other hand, I made my way blindly across the room toward the door as she shouted, “Hey, where’re you—” Behind me I heard the curtains scraping back, through my fingers I could feel the room filling with light as if a fire had broken out. I pulled open the door and did not look back. As I fled through the attic and down the first flight of stairs, I saw, beyond the edge of my vision, in that instant before I covered my eyes with my hand, a raised reddish sleeve with a slight sheen to it, slipping down along a ghostly shimmer of sunlit forearm, vague as an agitation of air. At the bottom of the second stairway I waved to Wolf’s mother, who turned out to be a jacket on the back of a shadowy chair, hurried through the living room, and escaped through the front door. Only when my bicycle was speeding down the curving drive between the high fence and the hedge did I turn to look back at the house, forgetting that, from this angle, I could see only the pines, the maples, the sunny and shady driveway turning out of sight.

School began three days later. Wolf was in none of my classes and I couldn’t find him in the halls. I had never called his house before — somehow our friendship had nothing to do with telephones — but that afternoon I dialed his number. The phone rang fourteen times before I hung up. I imagined the house in ruins, ravaged by sunlight. I looked for Wolf in school the next day, but he wasn’t there. No one knew anything about him. That afternoon after school I called in sick at the library and rode over to Wolf’s house on my bike. At the top of the curving drive it was still standing there, in shade broken by brilliant points of light. Wolf’s mother, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and holding a pair of pliers in one hand, answered the door. In the darkish living room she sat on the couch and I sat in an armchair, holding a glass of iced tea that I forgot to drink, as she told me that Wolf was attending a special boarding school in Massachusetts. Hadn’t he mentioned it? A liberal curriculum — a very liberal curriculum. As for Isabel, she’d gone to live for a while with her aunt in Maine, where she usually spent her summers and where she was now attending the public high school. Her year off had done her a world of good. Wolf’s mother thanked me for being so nice to Isabel, during her convalescence. At the front door she looked at me fondly. “Thank you for everything, David,” she said, and reached out her hand. She gave my hand a vigorous shake and stood watching me from the doorway as I rode off on my bike.

That fall I threw myself into my classes, but all I could think of was the room in the attic. It was as if I were missing some part of myself that I had to have but couldn’t find anywhere. In mid-October I got my driver’s license and began driving around on the weekends in my father’s car. I took up with my semiofficial girlfriend and went to dances and football games. One Saturday afternoon I drove into Wolf’s neighborhood, but though I slowed down at his driveway, with its scattering of yellow leaves, I passed it without going in. Often I wondered what would have happened if I had turned to look at her, the day the curtains parted. And I saw it clearly: the sun-filled air, the dust swirling in shafts of light, the bright empty room. No, far better to have turned away, to have understood that, for me, Isabel existed only in the dark. Like a ghost at dawn — like the princess of a magic realm — she had to vanish at the first touch of light. So I drove around in my father’s car, waiting for something that never came. By spring of senior year I was caught up in so many things that I had trouble remembering what had happened, exactly, in that dark room, in that vague house, on that winding road on the other side of town. Only now and then an image would rise up out of nowhere and make me thoughtful for a while — an ivory sage bent over his book, a furry earmuff, and that slow, lazy smile, with its little touch of mockery.

DANGEROUS LAUGHTER

FEW OF US now recall that perilous summer. What began as a game, a harmless pastime, quickly took a turn toward the serious and obsessive, which none of us tried to resist. After all, we were young. We were fourteen and fifteen, scornful of childhood, remote from the world of stern and ludicrous adults. We were bored, we were restless, we longed to be seized by any whim or passion and follow it to the farthest reaches of our natures. We wanted to live — to die — to burst into flame — to be transformed into angels or explosions. Only the mundane offended us, as if we secretly feared it was our destiny. By late afternoon our muscles ached, our eyelids grew heavy with obscure desires. And so we dreamed and did nothing, for what was there to do, played ping-pong and went to the beach, loafed in backyards, slept late into the morning — and always we craved adventures so extreme we could never imagine them.

In the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen.

The game began innocently and spread like a dark rumor. In cool playrooms with parallelograms of sunlight pouring through cellar windows, at ping-pong tables in hot, open garages, around yellow and blue beach towels lying on bright sand above the tide line, you would hear the quiet words, the sharp bursts of laughter. The idea had the simplicity of all inspired things. A word, any word, uttered in a certain solemn tone, could be compelled to reveal its inner stupidity. “Cheese,” someone would say, with an air of somber concentration, and again, slowly: “Cheese.” Someone would laugh; it was inevitable; the laughter would spread; gusts of hilarity would sweep through the group; and just as things were about to die down, someone would cry out “Elbow!” or “Dirigible!” and bursts of laughter would be set off again. What drew us wasn’t so much the hidden absurdity of words, which we’d always suspected, as the sharp heaves and gasps of laughter itself. Deep in our inner dark, we had discovered a startling power. We became fanatics of laughter, devotees of eruption, as if these upheavals were something we hadn’t known before, something that would take us where we needed to go.

Such simple performances couldn’t satisfy us for long. The laugh parties represented a leap worthy of our hunger. The object was to laugh longer and harder than anyone else, to maintain in yourself an uninterrupted state of explosive release. Rules sprang up to eliminate unacceptable laughter — the feeble, the false, the unfairly exaggerated. Soon every party had its judges, who grew skillful in detecting the slightest deviation from the genuine. As long laughter became the rage, a custom arose in which each of us in turn had to step into a circle of watchers, and there, partly through the stimulus of a crowd already rippling with amusement, and partly through some inner trick that differed from person to person, begin to laugh. Meanwhile the watchers and judges, who themselves were continually thrown into outbursts that drove the laugher to greater and greater heights, studied the roars and convulsions carefully and timed the performance with a stopwatch.

In this atmosphere of urgency, abandon, and rigorous striving, accidents were bound to happen. One girl, laughing hysterically on a couch in a basement playroom, threw back her head and injured her neck when it struck the wooden couch-arm. A boy gasping with mad laughter crashed into a piano bench, fell to the floor, and broke his left arm. These incidents, which might have served as warnings, only heightened our sense of rightness, as if our wounds were signs that we took our laughter seriously.

Not long after the laugh parties began to spread through our afternoons, there arose a new pastime, which enticed us with promises of a more radical kind. The laugh clubs — or laugh parlors, as they were sometimes called — represented a bolder effort to draw forth and prolong our laughter. At first they were organized by slightly older girls, who invited “members” to their houses after dark. In accordance with rules and practices that varied from club to club, the girls were said to produce sustained fits of violent laughter far more thrilling than anything we had yet discovered. No one was certain how the clubs had come into being — one day they simply seemed to be there, as if they’d been present all along, waiting for us to find them.

It was rumored that the first club was the invention of sixteen-year-old Bernice Alderson, whose parents were never home. She lived in a large house in the wooded north end of town; one day she’d read in a history of Egypt that Queen Cleopatra liked to order a slave girl to bind her arms and tickle her bare feet with a feather. In her third-floor bedroom, Bernice and her friend Mary Chapman invited club members to remove their shoes and lie down one by one on the bed. While Mary, with her muscular arms, held the chest and knees firmly in place, Bernice began to tickle the outstretched body — on the stomach, the ribs, the neck, the thighs, the tops and sides of the feet. There was an art to it all: the art of invading and withdrawing, of coaxing from the depths a steady outpouring of helpless laughter. For the visitor held down on the bed, it was a matter of releasing oneself into the hands of the girls and enduring it for as long as possible. All you had to do was say “Stop.” In theory the laughter never had to stop, though most of us could barely hold out for three minutes.

Although the laugh parlors existed in fact, for we all attended them and even began to form clubs of our own, they also continued to lead a separate and in a sense higher existence in the realm of rumor, which had the effect of lifting them into the inaccessible and mythical. It was said that in one of these clubs, members were required to remove their clothes, after which they were chained to a bed and tickled savagely to the point of delirium. It was said that one girl, sobbing with laughter, gasping, began to move her hips in strange and suggestive ways, until it became clear that the act of tickling had brought her to orgasm. The erotic was never absent from these rumors — a fact that hardly surprised us, since those of us who were purists of laughter and disdained any crude crossing over into the sexual recognized the kinship between the two worlds. For even then we understood that our laughter, as it erupted from us in unseemly spasms, was part of the kingdom of forbidden things.

As laugh parties gave way to laugh parlors, and rumors thickened, we sometimes had the sense that our secret games had begun to spread to other regions of the town. One day a nine-year-old boy was discovered by his mother holding down and violently tickling his seven-year-old sister, who was shrieking and screaming — the collar of her dress was soaked with tears. The girl’s pale body was streaked with lines of deep pink, as if she’d been struck repeatedly with a rope. We heard that Bernice Alderson’s mother, at home for a change, had entered the kitchen with a heavy bag of groceries in her arms, slipped on a rubber dog-toy, and fallen to the floor. As she sat there beside a box of smashed and oozing eggs and watched the big, heavy, thumping oranges go rolling across the linoleum, the corners of her mouth began to twitch, her lungs, already burning with anger, began to tingle, and all at once she burst into laughter that lashed her body, threw her head back against the metal doors of the cabinet under the sink, rose to the third-floor bedroom of her daughter, who looked up frowning from a book, and in the end left her exhausted, shaken, bruised, panting, and exhilarated. At night, in my hot room, I lay restless and dissatisfied, longing for the release of feverish laughter that alone could soothe me — and through the screen I seemed to hear, along with the crickets, the rattling window-fan next door, and the hum of far-off trucks on the thruway, the sound of laughter bursting faintly in the night, all over our town, like the buzz of a fluorescent lamp in a distant bedroom.

One night after my parents were asleep I left the house and walked across town to Bernice Alderson’s neighborhood. The drawn shade of her third-floor window was aglow with dim yellow light. On the bed in her room Mary Chapman gripped me firmly while Bernice bent over me with a serious but not unkind look. Slowly she brought me to a pitch of wild laughter that seemed to scald my throat as sweat trickled down my neck and the bed creaked to the rhythm of my deep, painful, releasing cries. I held out for a long time, nearly seven minutes, until I begged her to stop. Instantly it was over. Even as I made my way home, under the maples and lindens of a warm July night, I regretted my cowardice and longed for deeper and more terrible laughter. Then I wondered how I could push my way through the hours that separated me from my next descent into the darkness of my body, where laughter lay like lava, waiting for a fissure to form that would release it like liquid fire.

Of course we compared notes. We’d known from the beginning that some were more skilled in laughter than others, that some were able to sustain long and robust fits of the bone-shaking kind, which seemed to bring them to the verge of hysteria or unconsciousness without stepping over the line. Many of us boasted of our powers, only to be outdone by others; rumors blossomed; and in this murky atmosphere of extravagant claims, dubious feats, and unverifiable stories, the figure of Clara Schuler began to stand out with a certain distinctness.

Clara Schuler was fifteen years old. She was a quiet girl, who sat very still in class with her book open before her, eyes lowered and both feet resting on the floor. She never drummed her fingers on the desk. She never pushed her hair back over her ear or crossed and uncrossed her legs — as if, for her, a single motion were a form of disruption. When she passed a handout to the person seated behind her, she turned her upper body abruptly, dropped the paper on the desk with lowered eyes, and turned abruptly back. She never raised her hand in class. When called on, she flushed slightly, answered in a voice so quiet that the teacher had to ask her to “speak up,” and said as little as possible, though it was clear she’d done the work. She seemed to experience the act of being looked at as a form of violation; she gave you the impression that her idea of happiness would be to dissolve gradually, leaving behind a small puddle. She was difficult to picture clearly — a little pale, her hair dark in some elusive shade between brown and black, her eyes hidden under lowered lids that sometimes opened suddenly to reveal large, startled irises. She wore trim knee-length skirts and solid-colored cotton blouses that looked neatly ironed. Sometimes she wore in her collar a small silver pin shaped like a cat.

One small thing struck me about Clara Schuler: in the course of the day she would become a little unraveled. Strands of hair would fall across her face, the back of her blouse would bunch up and start to pull away from her leather belt, one of her white socks would begin to droop. The next day she’d be back in her seat, her hair neatly combed, her blouse tucked in, her socks pulled up tight with the ribs perfectly straight, her hands folded lightly on her maplewood desk.

Clara had one friend, a girl named Helen Jacoby, who sat with her in the cafeteria and met her at the lockers after class. Helen was a long-boned girl who played basketball and laughed at anything. When she threw her head back to drink bottles of soda, you could see the ridges of her trachea pressing through her neck. She seemed an unlikely companion for Clara Schuler, but we were used to seeing them together and we felt, without thinking much about it, that each enhanced the other — Helen made Clara seem less strange and solitary, in a sense protected her and prevented her from being perceived as ridiculous, while Clara made good old Helen seem more interesting, lent her a touch of mystery. We weren’t surprised, that summer, to see Helen at the laugh parties, where she laughed with her head thrown back in a way that reminded me of the way she drank soda; and it was Helen who one afternoon brought Clara Schuler with her and introduced her to the new game.

I began to watch Clara at these parties. We all watched her. She would step into the circle and stand there with lowered eyes, her head leaning forward slightly, her shoulders slumped, her arms tense at her sides — looking, I couldn’t help thinking, as if she were being punished in some humiliating way. You could see the veins rising up on the backs of her hands. She stood so motionless that she seemed to be holding her breath; perhaps she was; and you could feel something building in her, as in a child about to cry; her neck stiff; the tendons visible; two vertical lines between her eyebrows; then a kind of mild trembling in her neck and arms, a veiled shudder, an inner rippling, and through her body, still rigid but in the grip of a force, you could sense a presence, rising, expanding, until, with a painful gasp, with a jerk of her shoulders, she gave way to a cry or scream of laughter — laughter that continued to well up in her, to shake her as if she were possessed by a demon, until her cheeks were wet, her hair wild in her face, her chest heaving, her fingers clutching at her arms and head — and still the laughter came, hurling her about, making her gulp and gasp as if in terror, her mouth stretched back over her teeth, her eyes squeezed shut, her hands pressed against her ribs as if to keep herself from cracking apart.

And then it would stop. Abruptly, mysteriously, it was over. She stood there, pale — exhausted — panting. Her eyes, wide open, saw nothing. Slowly she came back to herself. Then quickly, a little unsteadily, she would walk away from us to collapse on a couch.

These feats of laughter were immediately recognized as bold and striking, far superior to the performances we had become accustomed to; and Clara Schuler was invited to all the laugh parties, applauded, and talked about admiringly, for she had a gift of reckless laughter we had not seen before.

Now whenever loose groups of us gathered to pursue our game, Clara Schuler was there. We grew used to her, waited impatiently for her when she was late, this quiet girl who’d never done anything but sit obediently in our classes with both feet on the floor before revealing dark depths of laughter that left us wondering and a little uneasy. For there was something about Clara Schuler’s laughter. It wasn’t simply that it was more intense than ours. Rather, she seemed to be transformed into an object, seized by a force that raged through her before letting her go. Yes, in Clara Schuler the discrepancy between the body that was shaken and the force that shook it appeared so sharply that at the very moment she became most physical she seemed to lose the sense of her body altogether. For the rest of us, there was always a touch of the sensual in these performances: breasts shook, hips jerked, flesh moved in unexpected ways. But Clara Schuler seemed to pass beyond the easy suggestiveness of moving bodies and to enter new and more ambiguous realms, where the body was the summoner of some dark, eruptive power that was able to flourish only through the accident of a material thing, which it flung about as if cruelly before abandoning it to the rites of exhaustion.

One day she appeared among us alone. Helen Jacoby was at the beach, or out shopping with her mother. We understood that Clara Schuler no longer needed her friend in the old way — that she had come into her own. And we understood one other thing: she would allow nothing to stop her from joining our game, from yielding to the seductions of laughter, for she lived, more and more, only in order to let herself go.

It was inevitable that rumors should spring up about Clara Schuler. It was said that she’d begun to go to the laugh parlors, those half-real, half-legendary places where laughter was wrung out of willing victims by special arts. It was said that one night she had paid a visit to Bernice Alderson’s house, where in the lamplit bedroom on the third floor she’d been constrained and skillfully tickled for nearly an hour, at which point she fainted dead away and had to be revived by a scented oil rubbed into her temples. It was said that at another house she’d been so shaken by extreme laughter that her body rose from the bed and hovered in the air for thirty seconds before dropping back down. We knew that this last was a lie, a frivolous and irritating tale fit for children, but it troubled us all the same, it seized our imaginations — for we felt that under the right circumstances, with the help of a physiologically freakish but not inconceivable pattern of spasms, it was the kind of thing Clara Schuler might somehow be able to do.

As our demands became more exacting, and our expectations more refined, Clara Schuler’s performances attained heights of release that inflamed us and left no doubt of her power. We tried to copy her gestures, to jerk our shoulders with her precise rhythms, always without success. Sometimes we imagined we could hear, in Clara Schuler’s laughter, our own milder laughter, changed into something we could only long for. It was as if our dreams had entered her.

I noticed that her strenuous new life was beginning to affect her appearance. Now when she came to us her hair fell across her cheeks in long strands, which she would impatiently flick away with the backs of her fingers. She looked thinner, though it was hard to tell; she looked tired; she looked as if she might be coming down with something. Her eyes, no longer hidden under lowered lids, gazed at us restlessly and a little vaguely. Sometimes she gave the impression that she was searching for something she could no longer remember. She looked expectant; a little sad; a little bored.

One night, unable to sleep, I escaped from the house and took a walk. Near the end of my street I passed under a streetlamp that flickered and made a crackling sound, so that my shadow trembled. It seemed to me that I was that streetlamp, flickering and crackling with restlessness. After a while I came to an older neighborhood of high maples and gabled houses with rundown front porches. Bicycles leaned wearily against wicker furniture and beach towels hung crookedly over porch rails. I stopped before a dark house near the end of the street. Through an open window on the second floor, over the dirt driveway, I heard the sound of a rattling fan.

It was Clara Schuler’s house. I wondered if it was her window. I walked a little closer, looking up at the screen, and it seemed to me that through the rattle and hum of the fan I heard some other sound. It was-I thought it was — the sound of quiet laughter. Was she lying there in the dark, laughing secretly, releasing herself from restlessness? Could she be laughing in her sleep? Maybe it was only some trick of the fan. I stood listening to that small, uncertain sound, which mingled with the blades of the fan until it seemed the fan itself was laughing, perhaps at me. What did I long for, under that window? I longed to be swept up into Clara Schuler’s laughter, I longed to join her there, in her dark room, I longed for release from whatever it was I was. But whatever I was lay hard and immovable in me, like bone; I would never be free of my own weight. After a while I turned around and walked home.

It wasn’t long after this visit that I saw Clara Schuler at one of the laugh parlors we’d formed, in imitation of those we had heard about or perhaps had invented in order to lure ourselves into deeper experiments. Helen Jacoby sat on the bed and held Clara’s wrists while a friend of Helen’s held Clara’s ankles. A blond-haired girl I’d never seen before bent over her with hooked fingers. Five of us watched the performance. It began with a sudden shiver, as the short blunt fingers darted along her ribs and thighs. Clara Schuler’s head began to turn from side to side; her feet in her white socks stiffened. As laughter rushed through her in sharp shuddering bursts, one of her shoulders lifted as if to fold itself across her neck. Within ten minutes her eyes had grown glassy and calm. She lay almost still, even as she continued to laugh. What struck us was that eerie stillness, as if she’d passed beyond struggle to some other place, where laughter poured forth in pure, vigorous streams.

Someone asked nervously if we should stop. The blond-haired girl glanced at her watch and bent over Clara Schuler more intently. After half an hour, Clara began breathing in great wracking gulps, accompanied by groans torn up from her throat. Helen asked her if she’d had enough; Clara shook her head harshly. Her face was so wet that she glowed in the lamplight. Stains of wetness darkened the bedspread.

When the session had lasted just over an hour, the blond-haired girl gave up in exhaustion. She stood shaking her wrists, rubbing the fingers of first one hand and then the other. On the bed Clara Schuler continued stirring and laughing, as if she still felt the fingers moving over her. Gradually her laughter grew fainter; and as she lay there pale and drained, with her head turned to one side, her eyes dull, her lips slack, strands of long hair sticking to her wet cheek, she looked, for a moment, as if she’d grown suddenly old.

It was at this period, when Clara Schuler became queen of the laugh parlors, that I first began to worry about her. One day, emerging from an unusually violent and prolonged series of gasps, she lay motionless, her eyes open and staring, while the fingers played over her skin. It took some moments for us to realize she had lost consciousness, though she soon revived. Another time, walking across a room, she thrust out an arm and seized the back of a chair as her body leaned slowly to one side, before she straightened and continued her walk as if nothing had happened. I understood that these feverish games, these lavish abandonments, were no longer innocent. Sometimes I saw in her eyes the restless unhappiness of someone for whom nothing, not even such ravishments, would ever be enough.

One afternoon when I walked to Main Street to return a book to the library, I saw Clara Schuler stepping out of Cerino’s grocery store. I felt an intense desire to speak to her; to warn her against us; to praise her extravagantly; to beg her to teach me the difficult art of laughter. Shyness constrained me, though I wasn’t shy — but it was as if I had no right to intrude on her, to break the spell of her remoteness. I kept out of sight and followed her home. When she climbed the wooden steps of her porch, one of which creaked like the floor of an attic, I stepped boldly into view, daring her to turn and see me. She opened the front door and disappeared into the house. For a while I stood there, trying to remember what it was I had wanted to say to Clara Schuler, the modest girl with a fierce, immodest gift. A clattering startled me. Along the shady sidewalk, trembling with spots of sunlight, a girl with yellow pigtails was pulling a lollipop-red wagon, which held a jouncing rhinoceros. I turned and headed home.

That night I dreamed about Clara Schuler. She was standing in a sunny backyard, looking into the distance. I came over to her and spoke a few words, but she did not look at me. I began to walk around her, speaking urgently and trying to catch her gaze, but her face was always turned partly away, and when I seized her arm it felt soft and crumbly, like pie dough.

About this time I began to sense among us a slight shift of attention, an inner wandering. A change was in the air. The laugh parlors seemed to lack their old aura of daring — they’d grown a little familiar, a little humdrum. While one of us lay writhing in laughter, the rest of us glanced toward the windows. One day someone pulled a deck of cards from a pocket, and as we waited our turn on the bed we sat down on the floor to a few hands of gin rummy.

We tried to conjure new possibilities, but our minds were mired in the old forms. Even the weather conspired to hold us back. The heat of midsummer pressed against us like fur. Leaves, thick as tongues, hung heavily from the maples. Dust lay on polished furniture like pollen.

One night it rained. The rain continued all the next day and night; wind knocked down tree branches and telephone wires. In the purple-black sky, prickly lines of lightning burst forth with troubling brightness. Through the dark rectangles of our windows, the lightning flashes looked like textbook diagrams of the circulation of the blood.

The turn came with the new sun. Mist like steam rose from soaked grass. We took up our old games, but it was as if something had been carried off by the storm. At a birthday party in a basement playroom with an out-of-tune piano, a girl named Janet Bianco, listening to a sentimental song, began to behave strangely. Her shoulders trembled, her lips quivered. Mirthless tears rolled along her cheeks. Gradually we understood that she was crying. It caught our attention — it was a new note. Across the room, another girl suddenly burst into tears.

A passion for weeping seized us. It proved fairly easy for one girl to set off another, who set off a third. Boys, tense and embarrassed, gave way slowly. We held weep-fests that left us shaken and thrilled. Here and there a few laugh parties and laugh clubs continued to meet, but we knew it was the end of an era.

Clara Schuler attended that birthday party. As the rage for weeping swept over us, she appeared at a few gatherings, where she stood off to one side with a little frown. We saw her there, looking in our direction, before she began to shimmer and dissolve through our abundant tears. The pleasures of weeping proved more satisfying than the old pleasures of laughter, possibly because, when all was said and done, we weren’t happy, we who were restless and always in search of diversion. And whereas laughter had always been difficult to sustain, weeping, once begun, welled up in us with gratifying ease. Several girls, among them Helen Jacoby, discovered in themselves rich and unsuspected depths of unhappiness, which released in the rest of us lengthy, heartfelt bouts of sorrow.

It wasn’t long after the new craze had swept away the old that we received an invitation from Clara Schuler. None of us except Helen Jacoby had ever set foot in her house before. We arrived in the middle of a sunny afternoon; in the living room it was already dusk. A tall woman in a long drab dress pointed vaguely toward a carpeted stairway. Clara, she said, was waiting for us in the guest room in the attic. At the top of the stairs we came to a hallway covered with faded wallpaper, showing repeated waterwheels beside repeated streams shaded by willows. A door with a loose knob led up to the attic. Slowly we passed under shadowy rafters that slanted down over wooden barrels and a big bear in a chair and a folded card-table leaning against a tricycle. Through a half-open door we entered the guest room. Clara Schuler stood with her hands hanging down in front of her, one hand lightly grasping the wrist of the other.

It looked like the room of someone’s grandmother, which had been invaded by a child. On a frilly bedspread under old lace curtains sat a big rag doll wearing a pink dress with an apron. Her yellow yarn hair looked as heavy as candy. On top of a mahogany chest of drawers, a black-and-white photograph of a bearded man sat next to a music box decorated with elephants and balloons. It was warm and dusty in that room; we didn’t know whether we were allowed to sit on the bed, which seemed to belong to the doll, so we sat on the floor. Clara herself looked tired and tense. We hadn’t seen her for a while. We hardly thought about her. It occurred to me that we’d begun to forget her.

Seven or eight of us were there that day, sitting on a frayed maroon rug and looking awkwardly around. After a while Clara tried to close the door — the wood, swollen in the humid heat, refused to fit into the frame — and then walked to the center of the room. I had the impression that she was going to say something to us, but she stood looking vaguely before her. I could sense what she was going to do even before she began to laugh. It was a good laugh, one that reminded me of the old laugh parties, and a few of us joined her uneasily, for old times’ sake. But we were done with that game, we could scarcely recall those days of early summer. And, in truth, even our weeping had begun to tire us, already we longed for new enticements. Maybe Clara had sensed a change and was trying to draw us back; maybe she simply wanted to perform one more time. If she was trying to assert her old power over us, she failed entirely. But neither our half hearted laughter nor our hidden resistance seemed to trouble her, as she abandoned herself to her desire.

There was a concentration in Clara Schuler’s laughter, a completeness, an immensity that we hadn’t seen before. It was as if she wanted to outdo herself, to give the performance of her life. Her face, flushed on the cheek ridges, was so pale that laughter seemed to be draining away her blood. She stumbled to one side and nearly fell over — someone swung up a supporting hand. She seemed to be laughing harder and harder, with a ferocity that flung her body about, snapped her head back, wrenched her out of shape. The room, filled with wails of laughter, began to feel unbearable. No one knew what to do. At one point she threw herself onto the bed, gasping in what appeared to be an agony of laughter. Slowly, gracefully, the big doll slumped forward, until her head touched her stuck-out legs and the yellow yarn hair lay flung out over her feet.

After thirty-five minutes someone rose and quietly left. I could hear the footsteps fading through the attic.

Others began to leave; they did not say good-bye. Those of us who remained found an old Monopoly game and sat in a corner to play. Clara’s eyes had taken on their glassy look, as cries of laughter continued to erupt from her. After the first hour I understood that no one was going to forgive her for this.

When the Monopoly game ended, everyone left except Helen Jacoby and me. Clara was laughing fiercely, her face twisted as if in pain. Her skin was so wet that she looked hard and shiny, like metal. The laughter, raw and harsh, poured up out of her as if some mechanism had broken. One of her forearms was bruised. The afternoon was drawing on toward five when Helen Jacoby, turning up her hands and giving a bitter little shrug, stood up and walked out of the room.

I stayed. And as I watched Clara Schuler, I had the desire to reach out and seize her wrist, to shake her out of her laughter and draw her back before it was too late. No one is allowed to laugh like that, I wanted to say. Stop it right now. She had passed so far beyond herself that there was almost nothing left — nothing but that creature emptying herself of laughter. It was ugly — indecent — it made you want to look away. At the same time she bound me there, for it was as if she were inviting me to follow her to the farthest and most questionable regions of laughter, where laughter no longer bore any relation to earthly things and, sufficient to itself, soared above the world to flourish in the void. There, you were no longer yourself — you were no longer anything.

More than once I started to reach for her arm. My hand hung in front of me like some fragile piece of sculpture I was holding up for inspection. I saw that I was no more capable of stopping Clara Schuler in her flight than I was of joining her. I could only be a witness.

It was nearly half past five when I finally stood up. “Clara!” I said sharply, but I might as well have been talking to the doll. I wondered whether I’d ever spoken her name before. She was still laughing when I disappeared into the attic. Downstairs I told her mother that something was wrong, her daughter had been laughing for hours. She thanked me, turned slowly to gaze at the carpeted stairs, and said she hoped I would come again.

The local paper reported that Mrs. Schuler discovered her daughter around seven o’clock. She had already stopped breathing. The official cause of death was a ruptured blood vessel in the brain, but we knew the truth: Clara Schuler had died of laughter. “She was always a good girl,” her mother was quoted as saying, as if death were a form of disobedience. We cooperated fully with the police, who found no trace of foul play.

For a while Clara Schuler’s death was taken up eagerly by the weeping parties, which had begun to languish and which now gained a feverish new energy before collapsing decisively. It was late August; school was looming; as if desperately we hurled ourselves into a sudden passion for old board games, staging fierce contests of Monopoly and Risk, altering the rules in order to make the games last for days. But already our ardor was tainted by the end of summer, already we could see, in eyes glittering with the fever of obsession, a secret distraction.

On a warm afternoon in October I took a walk into Clara Schuler’s neighborhood. Her house had been sold. On the long front steps sat a little girl in a green-and-orange-checked jacket, leaning forward and tightening a roller skate with a big silver key. I stood looking up at the bedroom window, half expecting to hear a ghostly laughter. In the quiet afternoon I heard only the whine of a backyard chain saw and the slap of a jump rope against a sidewalk. I felt awkward standing there, like someone trying to peek through a window. The summer seemed far away, as distant as childhood. Had we really played those games? I thought of Clara Schuler, the girl who had died of a ruptured blood vessel, but it was difficult to summon her face. What I could see clearly was that rag doll, slowly falling forward. Something stirred in my chest, and to my astonishment, with a kind of sorrow, I felt myself burst into a sharp laugh.

I looked around uneasily and began walking away. I wanted to be back in my own neighborhood, where people didn’t die of laughter. There we threw ourselves into things for a while, lost interest, and went on to something else. Clara Schuler played games differently. Had we disappointed her? As I turned the corner of her street, I glanced back at the window over her dirt driveway. I had never learned whether it was her room. For all I knew, she slept on the other side of the house, or in the guest room in the attic. Again I saw that pink-and-yellow doll, falling forward in a slow, graceful, grotesque bow. No, my laughter was all right. It was a salute to Clara Schuler, an acknowledgment of her great gift. In her own way, she was complete. I wondered whether she had been laughing at us a little, up there in her attic.

As I entered the streets of my neighborhood, I felt a familiar restlessness. Everything stood out clearly. In an open, sunny garage, a man was reaching up to an aluminum ladder hanging horizontally on hooks, while in the front yard a tenth-grade girl wearing tight jeans rolled up to midcalf and a billowy red-and-black lumberjack shirt was standing with a rake beside a pile of yellow leaves shot through with green, shading her eyes and staring up at a man hammering on a roof. The mother of a friend of mine waved at me from behind the shady, sun-striped screen of a porch. Against a backboard above a brilliant white garage door, a basketball went round and round the orange rim of a basket. It was Sunday afternoon, time of the great boredom. Deep in my chest I felt a yawn begin; it went shuddering through my jaw. On the crosspiece of a sunny telephone pole, a grackle shrieked once and was still. The basketball hung in the white net. Suddenly it came unstuck and dropped with a smack to the driveway, the grackle rose into the air, somewhere I heard a burst of laughter. I nodded in the direction of Clara Schuler’s neighborhood and continued down the street. Tomorrow something was bound to happen.

HISTORY OF A DISTURBANCE

YOU ARE ANGRY, Elena. You are furious. You are desperately unhappy. Do you know you’re becoming bitter? — bitter as those little berries you bit into, remember? in the woods that time. You are frightened. You are resentful. My vow must have seemed to you extremely cruel, or insane. You are suspicious. You are tired. I’ve never seen you so tired. And of course: you are patient. You’re very patient, Elena. I can feel that patience of yours come rolling out at me from every ripple of your unforgiving hair, from your fierce wrists and tense blouse. It’s a harsh patience, an aggressive patience. It wants something, as all patience does. What it wants is an explanation, which you feel will free you in some way — if only from the grip of your ferocious waiting. But an explanation is just what’s not possible, not now and not ever. What I can give you is only this. Call it an explanation if you like. For me it’s a stammer — a shout in the dark.

Do things have beginnings, do you think? Or is a beginning only the first revelation of something that’s always been there, waiting to be found? I’m thinking of that little outing we took last summer, the one up to Sandy Point. I’d been working hard, maybe too hard, I had just finished that market-penetration study for Sherwood Merrick Associates, it was the right time to get away. You packed a picnic. You were humming in the kitchen. You were wearing those jeans I like, the ones with the left back pocket torn off, and the top of your bathing suit. I watched as you sliced a sandwich exactly in half. The sun struck your hands. Across your glowing fingers I could see the faint liquidy green cast by the little glass swan on the windowsill. It occurred to me that we rarely took these trips anymore, that we ought to do it more often.

Then we were off, you in that swooping straw hat with its touch of forties glamour, I in that floppy thing that makes me look like a demented explorer. An hour later and there was the country store, with the one red gas pump in front, there was the turn. We passed the summer cottages in the pines. The little parking lot at the end of the road was only half full. Over the stone wall we looked down at the stretch of sand by the lake. We went down the rickety steps, I with the thermos and picnic basket, you with the blanket and towels. Other couples lay in the sun. Some kids were splashing in the water, which rippled from a passing speedboat that made the white barrels rise and fall. The tall lifeguard stand threw a short shadow. Across the lake was a pier, where some boys were fishing. You spread the blanket, took off your hat, shook out your hair. You sat down and began stroking your arm with sunblock. I was sitting next to you, taking it all in, the brown-green water, the wet ropes between the white barrels, the gleam of the lotion on your arm. Everything was bright and clear, and I wondered when the last time was that I’d really looked at anything. Suddenly you stopped what you were doing. You glanced around at the beach, raised your face to the sky, and said, “What a wonderful day!” I turned and looked out at the water.

But I wasn’t looking at the water. I was thinking of what you had just said. It was a cry of contentment, a simple expression of delight, the sort of thing anyone might say, on such a day. But I had felt a little sharp burst of irritation. My irritation shocked me. But there it was. I’d been taking in the day, just like you, happy in all my senses. Then you said, “What a wonderful day!” and the day was less wonderful. The day — it’s really indecent to speak of these things! But it’s as if the day were composed of many separate and diverse presences — that bottle of soda tilted in the sand, that piece of blue-violet sky between the two dark pines, your green hand by the window — which suddenly were blurred together by your words. I felt that something vast and rich had been diminished somehow. I barely knew what you were talking about. I knew of course what you were talking about. But the words annoyed me. I wished you hadn’t spoken them. Something uncapturable in the day had been harmed by speech. All at once my irritation passed. The day, which had been banished, came streaming back. Spots of yellow-white sun trembled in brown tree-shadows on the lake-edge. A little girl shouted in the water. I touched your hand.

Was that the beginning? Was it the first sign of a disturbance that had been growing secretly? Two weeks later the Polinzanos had that barbecue. I’d been working hard, harder than usual, putting together a report for Warren and Greene, the one on consumer perception of container shapes for sports beverages. I had all the survey results but I was having trouble writing it up, something was off, I was happy to let it go for an evening. Ralph was in high spirits, flipping over the chicken breasts, pushing down tenderly on the steaks. He waved the spatula about in grand style as he talked real estate. That new three-story monster-house on the block, could you believe two mil, those show-off window arches, and did you get a load of that corny balcony, all of it throwing the neighborhood out of whack, a crazy eyesore, but hey, it was driving property values up, he could live with that. Later, in the near-dark, we sat on the screened porch watching the fireflies. From inside the house came voices, laughter. Someone walked slowly across the dark lawn. You were lying in the chaise. I was sitting in that creaky wicker armchair right next to you. Someone stood up from the glider and went into the kitchen. We were alone on the porch. Voices in the house, the shrill cries of crickets, two glasses of wine on the wicker table, moths bumping against the screens. I was in good spirits, relaxed, barely conscious of that report at the edge of my mind. You turned slowly to me. I remember the lazy roll of your head, your cheek against the vinyl strips, your hair flattened on one side, your eyelids sleepy. You said, “Do you love me?” Your voice was flirtatious, easy — you weren’t asking me to put a doubt to rest. I smiled, opened my mouth to answer, and for some reason recalled the afternoon at Sandy Point. And again I felt that burst of irritation, as if words were interposing themselves between me and the summer night. I said nothing. The silence began to swell. I could feel it pressing against both of us, like some big rubbery thing. I saw your eyes, still sleepy, begin to grow alert with confusion. And as if I were waking from a trance, I pushed away the silence, I beat it down with a yes yes yes, of course of course. You put your hand on my arm. All was well.

All was not well. In bed I lay awake, thinking of my irritation, thinking of the silence, which had been, I now thought, not like some big swelling rubbery thing, but like a piece of sharp metal caught in my throat. What was wrong with me? Did I love you? Of course I loved you. But to ask me just then, as I was taking in the night…Besides, what did the words mean? Oh, I understood them well enough, those drowsy tender words. They meant, Look, it’s a summer night, look, the lawn is dark but there’s still a little light left in the sky, they meant you wanted to hear my voice, to hear yourself ask a question that would bring you my voice — it was hardly a question at all, rather a sort of touch, rising out of the night, out of the sounds in the house, the flash of the fireflies. But you said, “Do you love me?” which seemed to require me to understand those words and no others, to think what they might exactly mean. Because they might have meant, Do you still love me as much as you once did even though I know you do, or Isn’t it wonderful to sit here and whisper together like teenagers on the dark porch, while people are in the bright living room, talking and laughing, or Do you feel this rush of tender feeling which is rising in me, as I sit here, on this porch, at night, in summer, at the Polinzanos’ barbecue, or Do you love everything I am and do, or only some things, and if so, which ones; and it seemed to me that that single word, “love,” was trying to compress within itself a multitude of meanings, was trying to take many precise and separate feelings and crush them into a single mushy mass, which I was being asked to hold in my hands like a big sticky ball.

Do you see what was happening? Do you see what I’m trying to say?

Despite these warnings, I hadn’t yet understood. I didn’t, at this stage, see the connection between the afternoon at Sandy Point, the night at the Polinzanos’ barbecue, and the report that was giving me so much trouble. I knew something was wrong, a little wrong, but I thought I’d been working too hard, I needed to relax a little, or maybe — I tried to imagine it — maybe the trouble was with us, with our marriage, a marriage problem. I don’t know when I began to suspect it was more dangerous than that.

Not long after the Polinzanos’ barbecue I found myself at the supermarket, picking up a few things for the weekend. You know how I love supermarkets. It excites me to walk down those big American avenues piled high with the world’s goods, as if the spoils of six continents are being offered to me in the aftermath of a triumphant war. At the same time I enjoy taking note of brand-name readability, shelf positioning, the attention-drawing power of competing package designs. I was in a buoyant mood. My work had gone well that day, pretty well. I wheeled my cart into the checkout line, set out my bags and boxes on the rubber belt, swiped my card. The girl worked her scanner and touchscreen, and I watched with pleasure as the product names appeared sharply on the new LCD monitor facing me above her shoulder. Only two years ago I’d designed a questionnaire on consumer attitudes toward point-of-sale systems in supermarket chains. I signed my slip and handed it to the girl. She smiled at me and said, “Have a good day.”

Instantly my mood changed. This time it wasn’t irritation that seized me, but a kind of nervousness. What was she trying to say to me? I realized that this thought was absurd. At the same time I stared at the girl, trying to grasp her meaning. Have a good day! What were the words trying to say? At the word “have” her front teeth had pressed into her lip: a big overbite. She looked at me. Have a good day! Good day! Have! “What do you—,” I said, and abruptly stopped. Things became very still. I saw two tiny silver rings at the top of her ear, one ring slightly larger than the other. I saw the black plastic edge of the credit-card terminal, a finger with purple nail polish, a long strip of paper with a red stripe running along each border. These elements seemed independent of one another. Somewhere a cash tray slid open, coins clanked. Then the finger joined the girl, the tray banged shut, I was standing by my shopping cart, studying the mesh pattern of the collapsible wire basket, trying to recall what was already slipping away. “You too,” I said, as I always do, and fled with my cart.

At dinner that evening I felt uneasy, as if I were concealing a secret. Once or twice I thought you were looking at me strangely. I studied the saltshaker, which looked pretty much the way it had always looked, but with, I thought, some slight change I couldn’t account for. In the middle of the night I woke suddenly and thought: Something is happening to me, things will never be the same. Then I felt, across the lower part of my stomach, a first faint ripple of fear.

In the course of the next few days I began listening with close attention to whatever was said to me. I listened to each part of what was said, and I listened to the individual words that composed each part. Words! Had I ever listened to them before? Words like crackles of cellophane, words like sluggish fat flies buzzing on sunny windowsills. The simplest remark began to seem suspect, a riddle — not devoid of meaning, but with a vague haze of meaning that grew hazier as I tried to clutch it. “Not on your life.” “You bet!” “I guess so.” I would be moving smoothly through my day when suddenly I’d come up against one of them, a word-snag, an obstacle in my path. A group of words would detach themselves from speech and stand at mock attention, sticking out their chests, as if to say: Here we are! Who are you? It was as if some space had opened up, a little rift, between words and whatever they were supposed to be doing. I stumbled in that space, I fell.

At the office I was still having difficulties with my report. The words I had always used had a new sheen of strangeness to them. I found it necessary to interrogate them, to investigate their intentions.

Sometimes they were slippery, like fistfuls of tiny silvery fish. Sometimes they took on a mineral hardness, as if they’d become things in themselves, but strange things, like growths of coral.

I don’t mean to exaggerate. I knew what words meant, more or less. A cup was a cup, a window a window. That much was clear. Was that much clear? There began to be moments of hesitation, fractions of a second when the thing I was looking at refused to accept any language. Or rather, between the thing and the word a question had appeared, a slight pause, a rupture.

I recall one evening, it must have been a few weeks later, when I stepped from the darkened dining room into the brightly lit kitchen. I saw a whitish thing on the white kitchen table. In that instant the whitishness on the white table was mysterious, ungraspable. It seemed to spill onto the table like a fluid. I felt a rush of fear. A moment later everything changed. I recognized a cup, a simple white cup. The word pressed it into shape, severed it — as if with the blow of an ax — from everything that surrounded it. There it was: a cup. I wondered what it was I’d seen before the word tightened about it.

I said to myself: You’ve been working too hard. Your brain is tired. You are not able to concentrate your attention. The words you are using appear to be the same words you have always used, but they’ve changed in some way, a way you cannot grasp. When this report is done, you are going to take a vacation. That will be good.

I imagined myself in a clean hotel, high up, on the side of a mountain. I imagined myself alone.

I think it was at this period that my own talk began to upset me. The words I uttered seemed like false smiles I was displaying at a party I’d gone to against my will. Sometimes I would overhear myself in the act of speech, like a man who suddenly sees himself in a mirror. Then I grew afraid.

I began to speak less. At the office, where I’d established a long habit of friendliness, I stayed stubbornly at my desk, staring at my screen and limiting myself to the briefest of exchanges, which themselves were not difficult to replace with gestures — a nod, a wave, a smile, a shrug. It’s surprising how little you need to say, really. Besides, everyone knew I was killing myself over that report. At home I greeted you silently. I said almost nothing at dinner and immediately shut myself up in my study. You hated my silence. For you it was a knife blade aimed at your neck. You were the victim and I was the murderer. That was the silent understanding we came to, quite early. And of course I didn’t murder you just once, I murdered you every day. I understood this. I struggled to be — well, noisier, for your sake. The words I heard emerging from my mouth sounded like imitations of human speech. “Yes, it’s hot, but not too hot,” I said. “I think that what she probably meant was that she.” The fatal fissure was there. On one side, the gush of language. On the other — what? I looked about. The world rushed away on all sides. If only one could be silent! In my study I avoided my irritating desk with its neat binders containing bar charts and statistical tables and sat motionless in the leather chair, looking out the window at the leaves of hydrangea bushes. I felt tremendously tired, but also alert. Not to speak, not to form words, not to think, not to smear the world with sentences — it was like the release of a band of metal tightening around my skull.

I was still able to do some work, during the day, a little work, though I was also staring a lot at the screen. I had command of a precise and specialized vocabulary that I could summon more or less at will. But the doubt had arisen, corroding my belief. Groups of words began to disintegrate under my intense gaze. I was like a man losing his faith, with no priest to turn to.

Always I had the sense that words concealed something, that if only I could abolish them I would discover what was actually there.

One evening I looked for a long time at my hand. Had I ever seen it before? I suppressed the word “hand,” rid myself of everything but the act of concentration. It was no longer a hand, not a piece of flesh with nails, wrinkles, bits of reddish-blond hair. There was only a thing, not even that — only the place where my attention fell. Gradually I felt a loosening, a dissolution of the familiar. And I saw: a thickish mass, yellowish and red and blue, a pulsing thing with spaces, a shaded clump. It began to flatten out, to melt into surrounding space, to attach itself to otherness. Then I was staring at my hand again, the fingers slightly parted, the skin of the knuckles like small walnuts, the nails with vertical lines of faint shine. I could feel the words crawling over my hand like ants on a bone. But for a moment I had seen something else.

I am a normal man, wouldn’t you say, intelligent and well educated, yes, with an aptitude for a certain kind of high-level work, but fundamentally normal, in temperament and disposition. I understood that what was happening to me was not within the range of the normal, and I felt, in addition to curiosity, an anger that this had come upon me, in the prime of life, like the onset of a fatal disease.

It was during one of those long evenings in my study, while you prowled somewhere in the house, that I recalled an incident from my childhood. For some reason I was in my parents’ bedroom, a forbidden place. I heard footsteps approaching. In desperation I stepped over to the closet, with its two sliding doors, then rolled one door open, plunged inside, pushed it shut. The long closet was divided into two parts, my mother’s side and my father’s side. I knew at once which side I’d entered by the dresses pressing against my cheeks, the tall pairs of high-heeled shoes falling against my ankles as I moved deeper within. Clumsily I crouched down among the fallen shoes, my head and shoulders buried in the bottoms of dresses. And though I liked the sweetish, urine-sharp smell of the leather shoes, the rub of the dresses against my face, the hems heavy on my shoulders, the faint perfume drifting from folds of fabric like dust from a slapped bed, at the same time I felt oppressed by it all, bound tightly in place by the thick leathery smell and the stony fall of cloth, crushed in a black grip. The dresses, the shoes, the pinkish smell of perfume, the scratchy darkness, all pushed against me like the side of a big cat, thrust themselves into my mouth and nose like fur. I could not breathe. I opened my mouth. I felt the dark like fingers closing around my throat. In terror I stumbled up with a harsh scrape of hangers, pulled wildly at the edge of the door, burst outside. Light streamed through the open blinds. Tears of joy burned on my cheeks.

As I sat in my study, recalling my escape from the dresses, it seemed to me that the light streaming through my parents’ blinds, in the empty room, was like the silence around me where I sat, and that the heavy dresses, the bittersweet smell of the shoes, the hand on my throat, were the world I had left behind.

I began to sense that there was another place, a place without words, and that if only I could concentrate my attention sufficiently, I might come to that place.

Once, when I was a student and had decided to major in business, I had an argument with a friend. He attacked business as a corrupt discipline, the sole purpose of which was to instill in people a desire to buy. His words upset me, not because I believed that his argument was sound, but because I felt that he was questioning my character. I replied that what attracted me to business was the precision of its vocabulary — a self-enclosed world of carefully defined words that permitted clarity of thought.

At the office I could see people looking at me and also looking away from me. The looks reminded me of the look I had caught in the eyes of the girl with the little rings in her ear, as I tried to understand her words, and the look in your eyes that night at the Polinzanos’ barbecue, when I opened my mouth and said nothing.

It was about this time that I began to notice, within me, an intention taking shape. I wondered how long it had been there, waiting for me to notice it. Though my mind was made up, my body hesitated. I was struck by how like me that was: to know, and not to act. Had I always been that way? It would be necessary to arrange a sick leave. There would be questions, difficulties. But aside from all that, finally to go through with it, never to turn back — such acts were not at all in my style.

And if I hesitated, it was also because of you. There you were, in the house. Already we existed in a courteous dark silence trembling with your crushed-down rage. How could I explain to you that words no longer meant what they once had meant, that they no longer meant anything at all? How could I say to you that words interfered with the world? Often I thought of trying to let you know what I knew I would do. But whenever I looked at you, your face was turned partly away.

I tried to remember what it was like to be a very young child, before the time of words. And yet, weren’t words always there, filling the air around me? I remember faces bending close, uttering sounds, coaxing me to leave the world of silence, to become one of them. Sometimes, when I moved my face a little, I could almost feel my skin brushing against words, like clusters of tiny, tickling insects.

One night after you’d gone to bed I rose slowly in my study. I observed myself with surprise, though I knew perfectly well what was happening. Without moving my lips I took a vow.

The next morning at breakfast I passed you a slip of paper. You glanced at it with disdain, then crumpled it in your fist. I remember the sound of the paper, which reminded me of fire. Your knuckles stuck up like stones.

When a monk takes a vow of silence, he does so in order to shut out the world and devote himself exclusively to things of the spirit. My vow of silence sought to renew the world, to make it appear before me in all its fullness. I knew that every element in the world — a cup, a tree, a day — was inexhaustible. Only the words that expressed it were vague or limited. Words harmed the world. They took something away from it and put themselves in its place.

When one knows something like that, Elena, one also knows that it isn’t possible to go on living in the old way.

I began to wonder whether anything I had ever said was what I had wanted to say. I began to wonder whether anything I had ever written was what I had wanted to write, or whether what I had wanted to write was underneath, trying to push its way through.

After dinner that day, the day of the crumpled paper, I didn’t go to my study but sat in the living room. I was hoping to soothe you somehow, to apologize to you with my presence. You stayed in the bedroom. Once you walked from the bedroom to the guest room, where I heard you making up the bed.

One night as I sat in my leather chair, I had the sensation that you were standing at the door. I could feel a hot place at the back of my neck. I imagined you there in the doorway, looking at me with cold fascination, with a sort of tender and despairing iciness. I saw your tired eyes, your strained mouth. Were you trying to understand me? After all, you were my wife, Elena, and we had once been able to understand each other. I turned suddenly, but no one was there.

Do you think it’s been easy for me? Do you? Do you think I don’t know how grotesque it must seem? A grown man, forty-three years old, in excellent health, happily married, successful enough in his line of work, who suddenly refuses to speak, who flees the sound of others speaking, shuns the sight of the written word, avoids his wife, leaves his job, in order to shut himself up in his room or take long solitary walks — the idea is clownish, disgusting. The man is mad, sick, damaged, in desperate need of a doctor, a lover, a vacation, anything. Stick him in a ward. Inject him with something. But then, think of the other side. Think of it! Think of the terrible life of words, the unstoppable roar of sound that comes rushing out of people’s mouths and seems to have no object except the evasion of silence. The talking species! We’re nothing but an aberration, an error of Nature. What must the stones think of us? Sometimes I imagine that if we were very still we could hear, rising from the forests and oceans, the quiet laughter of animals, as they listen to us talk. And then, lovely touch, the invention of an afterlife, a noisy eternity filled with the racket of rejoicing angels. My own heaven would be an immense emptiness — a silence bright and hard as the blade of a sword.

Listen, Elena. Listen to me. I have something to say to you, which can’t be said.

As I train myself to cast off words, as I learn to erase word-thoughts, I begin to feel a new world rising up around me. The old world of houses, rooms, trees, and streets shimmers, wavers, and tears away, revealing another universe as startling as fire. We are shut off from the fullness of things. Words hide the world. They blur together elements that exist apart, or they break elements into pieces, bind up the world, contract it into hard little pellets of perception. But the unbound world, the world behind the world — how fluid it is, how lovely and dangerous. At rare moments of clarity, I succeed in breaking through. Then I see. I see a place where nothing is known, because nothing is shaped in advance by words. There, nothing is hidden from me. There, every object presents itself entirely, with all its being. It’s as if, looking at a house, you were able to see all four sides and both roof slopes. But then, there’s no “house,” no “object,” no form that stops at a boundary, only a stream of manifold, precise, and nameless sensations, shifting into one another, pullulating, a fullness, a flow. Stripped of words, untamed, the universe pours in on me from every direction. I become what I see. I am earth, I am air. I am all. My eyes are suns. My hair streams among galaxies.

I am often tired. I am sometimes discouraged. I am always sure.

And still you’re waiting, Elena — even now. Even now you’re waiting for the explanation, the apology, the words that will justify you and set you free. But underneath that waiting is another waiting: you are waiting for me to return to the old way. Isn’t it true? Listen, Elena. It’s much too late for that. In my silent world, my world of exhausting wonders, there’s no place for the old words with which I deceived myself, in my artificial garden. I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.

And you? Maybe a moment will come when you’ll hesitate, hearing a word. In that instant lies your salvation. Heed the hesitation. Search out the space, the rift. Under this world there is another, waiting to be born. You can remain where you are, in the old world, tasting the bitter berries of disenchantment, or you can overcome yourself, rip yourself free of the word-lie, and enter the world that longs to take you in. To me, on this side, your anger is a failure of perception, your sense of betrayal a sign of the unawakened heart. Shed all these dead modes of feeling and come with me — into the glory of the fire.

Enough. You can’t know what these words have cost me, I who no longer have words to speak with. It’s like returning to the house of one’s childhood: there is the white picket fence, there is the old piano, the Schumann on the music rack, the rose petals beside the vase, and there, look! — above the banister, the turn at the top of the stairs. But all has changed, all’s heavy with banishment, for we are no longer who we were. Down with it. You too, Elena: let it go. Let your patience go, your bitterness, your sorrow — they’re nothing but words. Leave them behind, in a box in the attic, the one with all the broken dolls. Then come down the stairs and out into the unborn world. Into the sun. The sun.