Ms. Hempel Chronicles

Creep

AS CHILDREN, BEATRICE AND her brother lived on the very top floor of their house, in rooms that had been inhabited by servants nearly one hundred years before. Attached to the wall at the top of the stairs was a beautiful wooden box, with one side made of glass, and painted upon the glass, in tiny gold letters, were the names of rooms: master bedroom; butler’s pantry; dining room; conservatory; loggia. Through the glass you could see a complicated system of hammers and bells and cogs, strung together with bright copper wiring that disappeared through a hole in the bottom corner of the box and burrowed into the house’s thick walls, only to emerge on the floors below, inside each of the gold-lettered rooms, in the form of a button. The finger most often pressing the button was Beatrice’s, for when you pressed it, an electric current would course up the copper wiring to the top floor of the house, and a little bell inside the wooden box would ring, not a tinkling ring, but a sort of low-pitched vibration, similar to the sound people make when they’re cold: Brrrrrrrrrrr.

Beatrice never got tired of hearing this sound. She liked it so much, she invented a game called Servant: she would waft into a room, drape herself across a chair, and then, in a gesture both impatient and languid, poke the little button embedded in the wall. She would hear, very faintly, that low and lovely hum, and then the muffled drumbeat of her brother hurrying down the four flights of stairs. “How may I be of service, madam?” he had to ask, according to the rules. She would tell him, “I’m dying for a glass of water. On a tray,” or “Would you mind terribly, opening the curtains?” and depending upon how well he performed the tasks, a new round would begin, with Calvin climbing back up the stairs to wait beside the box and Beatrice deciding which room she would waft into next. But this was only one of many games she had invented, and maybe not as good as Teacher, or Dead, or Blackout.

Living, as they did, at the top of the house, Beatrice and her brother were surrounded by trees. In the summer, their rooms filled with a green light. In the winter, the fir boughs grew heavy with snow and brushed against their windowpanes. Because they lived in rooms meant only for servants, their windows were small and perfectly square, not long and grand like those in the rest of the house. But they preferred it this way: they liked living in their tiny rooms, aloft in the trees; they liked the green light falling in squares at their feet. Their rooms were almost the same, but not quite: Calvin had a fireplace in his, and Beatrice had a wall of bookshelves built into hers.

Beatrice didn’t read books anymore. All she did was listen to the radio. She listened late at night, to the pirate stations found at the bottom of the dial. In the place where books should have been, she kept her tremendous radio. It had once belonged to her mother, in the days when she still wore her hair long and wrote essays.

The pirate radio stations broadcast many different shows: they had names such as the Flophouse, and Nocturnal Emissions, and the Curious Sofa. Beatrice’s favorite was a pro-gram called the Rock Hotel. It came on every night at eleven o’clock and played music of the sort that Beatrice had never heard before, music that sounded at once grinding and frenzied, like a train car screeching backward down a mountain, and all the passengers inside howling. A velvety static blanketed everything, like snow falling on the scene of the disaster. Before discovering the Rock Hotel, Beatrice had believed that music was supposed to make things more beautiful and orderly.

That’s when I reach for my revolver, she sang in the bathroom. That’s when it all just slips away.

Calvin stood outside the door. “What are you doing?” he asked.

She threw the door open and lunged forward, her hand convulsing. “I’m practicing electric guitar,” she said.

Calvin tucked his chin against his shoulder and cocked his wrist in the air; he drew an invisible bow across invisible strings. “I will accompany you.”

Beatrice let her hands drop. For a moment she felt poisoned. But it was no use explaining that violins and guitars don’t go together. She knew what he would say, serenely: “It’s an electric violin.”

She wheeled to face the mirror hanging over the sink. “Give me a sword,” she said.

“Viking, Roman, or Greek?” Calvin asked.

“Viking!” Beatrice said. Her brother returned with the sword. Wielding it over her head, she studied herself in the mirror. Her arms, raised this way, looked thinner than they did when just hanging at her sides. She wondered what other reasons she might find to assume this position. “Tremble!” she said, to no one in particular.

Calvin wedged himself between her and the sink, so that he could brush his teeth. He brushed his teeth many times a day because he was concerned about plaque. On his birthday their mother had given him a kit containing a special yellow solution and a special handheld light. You sloshed the solution inside your mouth, made the bathroom completely dark, flicked on the special light, and saw, in beautiful and arctic blue, all the plaque that was slowly encrusting your teeth.

Beatrice staked her chin atop his head and made a totem pole. “Hermano hermano hermano” she said. Calvin was learning Spanish at school; she was helping him.

“Loggia,” he said indistinctly. He was still brushing his teeth.

“Aren’t you finished yet?” Beatrice asked, leaning upon the sword just as a very tired and very bored old lady would rest upon her cane.

“Don’t do that!” Calvin said, his mouth full of blue. He cherished his swords; he had three complete sets of armor and weaponry from three different periods of history. They were made of very durable plastic, but still: their mother had damaged the Roman-centurion one while trying to teach a lesson to the large raccoon that lurked about their driveway. Now, when brandished, it drooped in a pitiful way.

Beatrice turned on the bath. “Could I have a little privacy, please?” The bathtub was held up by four claws that looked as if they belonged to an eagle, or a big hawk. It was long enough so that you could submerge yourself entirely and still not feel anything pressing against your head or your feet. Beatrice and Calvin loved the bathtub. On Christmas they gave each other fat glass jars filled with bath beads, shining like jewels. Beatrice gave Calvin Peach Passion. Calvin gave Beatrice Gardenia. These she now deposited into the water. “I need to relax,” she said.

“So do I,” said Calvin mysteriously, as he retrieved his sword and floated out of the bathroom. The bathroom had two doors: one leading to his room, and the other to hers. In this way, it was like a joint.

Beatrice turned off the lights. She stepped into her bath. “I’m in my bath!” she called out. She splashed about in the darkness, and then she was still. She felt everything around her: boughs brushing against square windows; the large raccoon lurking; a hawk skimming right over the roof. Things were astir, things she couldn’t see. Out in the night, animals prowled and crept. Much farther away people were creeping about, too, making drug deals, going in and out of apartment buildings. The word, the idea—apartment—was enchanting. But she lived here, in the trees, at the very top of the house. Beneath her a gardenia bath bead dissolved, releasing its oil and its peculiar scent.

“IS ANYONE LISTENING? Anyone at all?” The radio spoke, glowing from her bookshelves.

Beatrice sat up in her bed. She was listening! In defiance of everyone: her mother and father, who fancied her asleep; her friends at school, who liked Prince and choreographed sexy dance routines to his songs; her piano teacher, for whom she played inventions and fugues, all the while thinking about an amplifier, a fuzzbox, a roadie. She didn’t exactly know what all of these things were, but she wanted them. She knew they existed, because visitors to the Rock Hotel would mention them in conversation. There was a band, for instance, called We’ve Got a Fuzzbox and We’re Gonna Use It, which was a mouthful, but that was the point. She was listening. She knew what to say. Not group: band. Not concert: show. You did not buy a ticket; you paid a cover at the door. Beatrice was paying attention, so that she would be prepared.

“Am I talking to myself?” the voice asked. “Am I the last person left?”

There was a long pause. “If you can hear me, I don’t care who you are, you have to pick up the phone and call me. Now. Make a request. Win a prize. I don’t care. You know what the number is.”

Beatrice did in fact know the telephone number. She often practiced dialing it but never considered doing it for real. The DJ tended to criticize those who called up the Rock Hotel. His name was Shred. He would make fun of people’s requests or else refer to them as psychopaths. “There are a lot of weird people out there,” he would murmur. “And they all love to call me.” But now he sounded lonely, and possibly like he was losing his mind. Beatrice wondered if she should reach out to him. Maybe in this vulnerable state he was less likely to belittle her.

She padded over to the radio and found the pocket diary she kept there, a gift from her mother, identical to those belonging to her brother and her father, in which they were each supposed to keep a growing list of Things to Do. In this diary Beatrice had written the names of the bands that she heard on the Rock Hotel: Squirrel Bait. Agent Orange. Pussy Galore. Angry Samoans. Big Black. Mission of Burma. The Cramps. She liked to copy these names in clean bold letters onto her school binders, and would be surprised to learn, at later points in her life, that these names were often attached to real things: Samoa is a country? And Samoans are the people who live there? They were islanders; they had been colonized; they had much to be angry about. But here, in the darkness and quiet of her bedroom, Samoans were simply residents of the Rock Hotel.

And as such, safe from ridicule. She would dial the num- ber; she would ask for the Angry Samoans. It was safe. She told herself this as the line rang. But still her heart quickened, neatly, like the piano teacher’s metronome, making her play the minor scales at increasingly reckless speeds. It was only a question of time before an accident occurred.

“Rock Hotel,” a voice said.

“Shred?” Beatrice asked. “I’m listening!”

“Good to know,” Shred said, sounding not at all close to the brink of despair. He sounded as if he were eating a sandwich. “What can I do for you?”

“Could you please play a song by the Angry Samoans?”

“Sure,” Shred said. “Which song?”

She had no idea. In her pocket diary she had not yet begun writing down the names of songs. He said it so fast, all the information she needed to know.

“You choose,” Beatrice said. “I trust you.”

Shred made a swallowing noise. “Will do,” he said. “Thanks for calling the Rock Hotel.”

Beatrice put down the receiver. She felt damp all over. Standing in the dim light of the radio, she stroked the telephone. She stroked her pocket diary, and then the radio itself. He had been terribly kind to her. That’s what she would say, if she ever met him — she would meet him, she decided, they would become friends and then go out together and live in an apartment — she’d say, “You were so nice! That first night we talked, you were so nice to me.” She practiced saying it aloud. Then she practiced saying it in an English accent.

As she glided back to her bed, she stumbled upon something warm and human. She gasped, without wanting to, for she already knew who it was. “Calvin,” she said. He was playing Cat Burglar.

She heard him slide into a sitting position; she heard him sigh with satisfaction. “That was a long time,” he said. “Maybe a record.” Though she couldn’t see him, she knew what he was wearing: their mother’s ancient turtleneck, the kind that was black and stretchy and had two long tongues that reached down and snapped together between the legs; black tights; black knitted gloves; a beret that their father had brought back from Montreal. The purpose of Cat Burglar was to slink into Beatrice’s room without her noticing. Any burgling was incidental. Calvin had developed this game entirely on his own. For Beatrice, the most enjoyable aspect was suddenly switching on the light, because Calvin seemed to believe that making himself flat was the same as making himself invisible, and it was interesting to see him pressed into the floor, limbs spread, as if a cement roller had traveled over him, or else smushed against a wall, trying not to breathe.

She didn’t turn on the light now. If she did, then all would be lost; she would see the flowers blooming on her bedspread; she would see the little porcelain lampstand man leaning toward the lampstand lady, his tiny porcelain lute in hand.

“Go to bed,” she told Calvin. “You’re feeling very, very sleepy.”

“Who’s English?” he wanted to know. “Who were you talking to?”

“Shred,” she said, and despised herself for saying it. Her book jackets, her sweaters, her new pointy shoes, the toes already scuffed: she couldn’t keep anything nice for longer than a minute. “He’s not English.”

“Who’s Shred?”

“Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” Beatrice said, and moving her hands through the darkness, she found something shaped like Calvin. She guided it toward the door. In the radio’s dim light, she saw the pair of sunglasses he had added to his disguise. These, combined with the beret, gave him the appearance of a strange and chic little person, like a boy whose parents are glamorous performers, and who spends his whole childhood drinking ginger ale in nightclubs. Beatrice filled with the intoxicating feeling of her brother being unfamiliar to her.

And then the radio spoke. It said, “This song goes out to the girl who wanted to hear some Angry Samoans.”

“That’s me,” Beatrice whispered, to no one in particular.

HER OTHER NIGHTTIME ACTIVITY often enthralled her so completely that she would still be awake when Shred announced it was one o’clock in the morning. She would look up miserably at the lampstand man casting his puny reflection against the black squares of her window. Having the light on in the middle of the night was a million times gloomier than having it off. But she needed the light to see what she was doing.

This other activity involved a pair of tweezers she had found in the first aid kit beneath the sink. In a slow but gratifying way, her eyebrows were disappearing. Everything else, meanwhile, was running amok. She seemed to have passed into another country, a place where it was impossible to remain intact: you found yourself shedding crooked snowflakes of skin, leaving squiggles of short, dark hair on your sheets. You were always leaving something behind. And it scared Beatrice, the thought that some excessive bit of her might detach itself and then be discovered by a tidier person. On a bar of soap, or in the collar of a sweater she had borrowed. The tweezers were not much help, in this unpleasant new country she had crossed into unawares; it would have been easier, maybe, to empty her bathtub with an eyedropper. But she kept them close at hand, inside the drawer of her bedside table, and at night she put them to furious use.

She was busy, but so was everyone else. They all had their projects. In the rooms below, her father was pushing furniture across the floor. Her mother was snapping rubber bands around handfuls of bobby pins, loose colored pencils, rolls of pennies. They opened and closed drawers. They raised and lowered their voices. They moved things around. And even Calvin was awake sometimes, splayed across the rug in his room, creating accord among his action figures. Beatrice could hear him murmuring, she could hear the chair legs scraping, she could feel the whole house ticking with their solitary habits, so it was no wonder then that in the mornings, her family, they did not look their best.

ONE NIGHT, LATE, THE telephone rang.

“Hello?” Beatrice said.

“Hey!” a voice said, sounding pleased. “How you doing?”

“Good,” seemed the right way to respond. She said it again. “Good.”

The person chuckled. “You don’t know who this is.”

“Sure I do!” Beatrice protested. “Of course I do. So how are you?”

“Happy to hear your voice.”

“Well,” she said. “I’m happy to hear yours.”

He asked, “What are you doing right now?”

Beatrice dropped her tweezers onto the bedspread. “Nothing,” she said. She tucked them back in their drawer. “Listening to the radio.”

Her bed made a squeaking noise as she stood up, ready for the next question. He would ask, Can I talk to your dad for a minute? and she would pound down the four flights of stairs; she would get, on her way back, a fruit roll-up from the kitchen. When the bed squeaked, she wondered, did it sound like she’d farted?

She waited for the question.

“That’s funny. I’m listening to the radio, too.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe we have a psychic connection.” And he chuckled again, to show that he was kidding.

As he said this, she realized that she did not, in fact, know the person she was speaking to. But it seemed too late to tell him that. And too late to feel alarmed. He was not an obscene phone caller, that much was for certain. She had received an obscene phone call before. Waiting for her brother on the steps outside the public library, she had heard the telephone ring from inside the telephone booth. When she answered it, a voice asked, Is your pussy very hairy? and though it would never have occurred to her to use those exact words, she did think to herself, as she slowly brought the phone down on the receiver, How did you know?

The person coughed on the other end of the line. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’m getting over a cold.”

The cough did not sound like it belonged to him. It sounded childlike and delicate and dry, like that of the rich little boy in The Secret Garden, who is wheeled about in a wicker chair with a blanket on his lap. He behaves peevishly until his better nature is revealed by someone poorer.

Beatrice said, “Bless you,” as if the person on the telephone had sneezed.

“That’s all right,” he said. “Shouldn’t you be in bed by now? Don’t you have school in the morning?”

“No,” she said, without irritation. For he hadn’t asked in a mindless way. And he wasn’t looking for her father or her mother. Somehow she knew now he wasn’t going to ask for them, ever.

“No,” she repeated. “I’m not in school anymore.” She closed her eyes to the bookshelves, and the pale blue bedside table.

She said, “I’m in a band.”

“Like the Bangles?”

“No!” she shrieked; in embarrassment, in dangerous-feeling delight. He thought it was true. “Like the Butthole Surfers.”

“Haven’t heard of them,” he murmured deferentially.

“They’re obscure,” she said. “A lot of people haven’t.”

This seemed a good time to mention her fuzzbox. Like a vocabulary word, she had to use it in a sentence: “I’ve got a fuzzbox” was all she could manage, which wouldn’t have passed muster on a quiz at her school. But who was keeping score? She heard herself suddenly saying aloud a number of things that until then she had only been able to say silently, as an experiment in her head.

She also learned about a profession she hadn’t known of before: landscaping. It involved the pruning and mowing of other people’s yards. This was what he did, the person with the dainty cough on the other end of the phone. Her parents, she thought, could use a landscaper. Their own yard was wild and overgrown, and a great source of contention. Her father believed that lawns were not ecologically sound; her mother believed that this was an excuse. But Beatrice mentioned none of this. She had already created the impression that she no longer lived at home, and that she belonged to the kind of family who didn’t even own a yard.

She detected something slithering across the floor. “Can you hold on a moment?” she asked, and clamped her hand over the mouth of the telephone.

“Calvin!” she said. “Please go burgle somewhere else!”

Something slithered away from her. Her bedroom door cracked open, and then it closed.

“Sorry,” Beatrice said into the telephone.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Oh yes,” she said.

“Who’s that yelling?”

It was Beatrice’s father. He was downstairs somewhere, thundering. Most likely the house was upsetting him. They had moved in more than three years before, but still their house hadn’t ceased to surprise them: it flooded in the springtime, ushered in hosts of flying ants, attracted the attentions of feral cats and raccoons. The chimney collapsed; the pipes burst; one windy afternoon, a red Spanish tile came flying off the roof and nearly hit Calvin on the head. The house was always in need of an expensive and immediate repair, the accumulation of which had begun to deeply discourage their father. He seemed to have pictured repairs on a much smaller and more charming scale, repairs that could create camaraderie within a family. Everyone gathered together, genially refinishing a banister, not scores of heavy-booted workmen, clumping through the house like a marauding army. “This is not what I imagined!” their father would bellow, a sound both terrifying and wounded. It was a sound she imagined an elephant might make when captured, its trunk curling up toward the sky. But she couldn’t figure out what he was saying now, with four long flights of stairs between them.

Beatrice took another chance. “It’s my boyfriend,” she said.

The person on the other end of the telephone paused.

“Should I hang up? Is he going to be mad?”

She pressed her mouth against the phone. “He already is mad.”

“He is? What’s he going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Beatrice whispered. “Wait—”

“What? What’s that noise?”

From outside her door came a long and low-pitched hum, similar to the sound people make when they’re cold: Brrrrrrrrrrr.

“I think he’s turned on the—” Beatrice inhaled sharply. “I have to go now.”

She put the telephone back into its cradle. Click! And like that, he was gone. He had risen up from some unfathomable place, and now he had sunk back down again, like Champ, or the Loch Ness monster, about which Calvin was building a diorama. Beatrice herself felt waterlogged, as if she had stayed in the bath for too long.

Outside her door, the beautiful wooden box vibrated steadily. Calvin, in his extreme stealth, was probably pressed up against the little button in one of the rooms downstairs. Beatrice stretched out on her bed and listened to the bell hum, imagining herself a lazy servant. But she did so halfheartedly. According to the rules, she was never the servant. Just as she was never the pupil, but always the teacher; never the person who discovers the dead body, but always the body, lying cold and immobile on the floor. How did these rules come about? Although she had invented them, they made no sense to her; they were arbitrary yet inviolable. She knew, for instance, that the telephone would ring again, maybe not this night but another night, and that when it rang she would say, “Hello?” and that the rules would then take over: he asking her questions, and she dreamily offering answers. He would be a landscaper, and she would be a guitar player in a band.

Calvin came into her room, not slithering this time. She felt him breathing on her. “Why didn’t you come?” he asked.

“Were you ringing for me?” Beatrice said.

“Yes!” Calvin said. “Why didn’t you come?”

He turned on her bedside lamp and appeared, in his beret and sunglasses and gloves. Far beneath them, their father bellowed.

“Did the toilet explode again?” she asked.

Calvin frowned. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I couldn’t tell. I tried ringing you.”

“I thought it was by accident,” Beatrice said.

“I made it through the kitchen, with the lights on. They didn’t see me. I snuck across the entire kitchen,” Calvin said. “Then I snuck into the Butler’s Pantry. I was waiting for you — I kept ringing the bell.”

“I didn’t understand,” Beatrice said. “I thought you were pushing the button by mistake.”

“Never mind,” he said wearily. “Too late now.”

He peeled off the black knit gloves and handed them to her. “You can have these back.”

“Don’t you need them?”

“No,” Calvin said. “I don’t. I’m done with that game.”

Without his gloves, he didn’t look like a cat burglar anymore. He didn’t even look chic and international. He looked half dressed and forlorn in his turtleneck and tights, like a girl someone forgot to pick up after tap dancing class.

NOW THAT HE HAD ABANDONED Cat Burglar, Calvin threw his energies into becoming a nosy person. It was as if all his passion for going undetected was now transformed into detecting something sneaky or amiss in Beatrice’s life. He pestered her constantly. Standing outside the bathroom door, he would repeat, tonelessly: “What are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing?”

Usually, Beatrice was practicing. Practicing lighting a cigarette, or driving a van and lighting a cigarette at the same time. Practicing talking with a cigarette dangling out the side of her mouth, or talking while gesturing with a cigarette in one hand. She had no cigarettes with which to practice, so she rolled up a little piece of paper and held it together with Scotch tape. Sometimes it was easier to use an invisible cigarette, like when she practiced sticking her cigarette between the tuning pegs of her guitar, which was also, at this point, invisible.

“What are you doing?” Calvin repeated.

“I’m smoking!” Beatrice shouted.

A moment of silence from outside the door. Then: “Beatrice…,” Calvin said in a threatening tone. And when she ignored him: “Beatrice…?” he said, sounding afraid. “You shouldn’t be smoking. You know you shouldn’t be.”

She flung the door open and glared. “I’m kidding. Ha ha. I’m only kidding.”

Calvin also began taking an unhealthy interest in the Rock Hotel. “Is it on yet?” he would ask, hovering beside the radio. “Tell me when it’s on,” he ordered Beatrice. Anytime a voice came onto the air, even if it was only the weatherman, Calvin would say, “That’s Shred, right? That’s Shred.” He pretended that he liked listening to the music, closing his eyes and nodding to the frenzied sounds. “I love that song,” he’d say.

But Beatrice knew he was only pretending. For sometimes he would turn away from the radio, blink a few times, and ask musingly, “What are they so angry about?” He was still young enough to think in the same fretful ways as adults. In more charitable moods, Beatrice would say, “One day, Calvin, it will sound different to you.” One day he would be able to tell, like she could, when a song was by Dag Nasty or Minor Threat, even before Shred said anything. “You will be able to tell the difference,” she told him, “between being angry and being alive.”

It was a distinction she tried to impart to the person on the telephone.

“Why is your boyfriend always yelling?” he asked.

“It’s just what he does,” she said. It had become what she did, too: shut her bedroom door and sing along to the Rock Hotel in a strained voice she didn’t wholly recognize. That’s when I reach for my revolver! she would yell, and it made her feel exhilarated, alert, terrifyingly capable. She couldn’t wait until she could drive in a car and yell at the same time.

“Doesn’t it bother you?”

“I don’t take it personally,” she said.

“Why don’t you leave him?” the person asked. “Try someone new.”

“You make it sound easy.” She didn’t like when the conversation sidled off in this direction. “When it isn’t easy at all. Leaving is the hardest thing a person can do,” she said firmly, and then reminded him: “We live together.”

“I guess that’s true,” he admitted. “You get attached, I guess.”

“And we’d have to break up the band.”

“But you could start a new one. An all-girl band.”

Beatrice sighed. “It’s not that simple. I would still have feelings for him.”

And she wondered at the ease with which she could talk about relationships, having never actually had one herself. It was amazing what practice and imagination could accomplish. By the time she went to her first show, moved into her first apartment, smoked her first cigarette, it would seem, she supposed, like she had been doing it for her entire life. Maybe by the time she had her first boyfriend, even, she would already be tired, having rehearsed so long for all of that trouble.

She explained, “Sometimes we don’t have a say in who we love.”

Even though she said it patiently, she had a feeling that he still didn’t understand, and that he would persist in being obtuse when it came to this subject. There was a willful streak in him, a doggedness, as if he’d picked up the personality of a dandelion or a patch of crabgrass. He asked the same questions every time he called. He asked them in the same tentative, mournful tone. She was trying to break him of the habit.

“Tell me about your day,” she demanded. “Tell me something interesting.”

“Oh god,” he moaned. He was stumped. “That’s impossible.”

Then, as if in disgust, the house shuddered. It was barely perceptible, no more than a mild spasm, because the house was so large and the walls so thick. Workmanship, she had heard repeated. Houses weren’t made that way anymore. When someone slammed the back door, you hardly felt it.

There was the sound of metal scraping across the driveway, and then her father’s voice, clear and deep and appalling: “I’m doing it!” he bellowed.

The person on the other end of the phone let out another moan.

“I don’t get it,” he muttered. “I don’t get it at all.”

How to explain?

“We have a lot in common,” Beatrice said, and strangely, here in the hubbub of her inventions, was something true. Her father relished the tricky fugues she played for him. They both found the back of Calvin’s neck irresistible to touch. And there was an abundance about him, an over-exuberance, that she was unhappily beginning to see in herself. When he hugged you, for instance, you could feel the springy growth beneath his shirt, and on the one hand it was revolting; on the other, it was like resting your cheek against moss.

“A lot in common,” the person echoed, an idea that seemed at last to dishearten him, when obstacles such as the band, and the apartment, had allowed him hope. Maybe he felt, in all of his dullness, a knuckle of truth. He began to cough again in his childlike, enfeebled way.

But then he stopped coughing so abruptly that it made it seem as if he had been pretending all along. He spoke in a calm voice not unlike the one she used with him. He said, “What would you do if one day he just never came home?”

“Excuse me?”

“You’d be all alone. You’d want someone to hold you.”

“I’m sorry?” she asked, as though his cough had prevented her from hearing him correctly. She decided that this cough made it impossible for her to hear much of what he said. His dry little cough was, she decided, settling farther into his chest; it was indicating quite ominous things about his health.

“You should take lozenges,” she said briskly, suddenly ready to get off the telephone. Lozenges was a word she had acquired a year ago, during her book-reading era, before she had discovered the Rock Hotel, in the days when she was still planning to emigrate to England and become a historical novelist. How bizarre. That person, and the person she was now? They wouldn’t even be friends.

THE TELEPHONE WASN’T ALWAYS in her room when she needed it. According to Calvin, he had calls to make. When she saw the long gray cord snaking out of her room and under his door, she would succumb, briefly, to bloodthirsty feelings. He had no one to talk to. Not at this hour. But she could hear him speaking in his bell-like voice, speaking slowly and precisely, like a person giving instructions to someone less intelligent. The conversations were always short. And always obviously pretend. She knew because she had done it herself, in the past, talk to the dial tone as though it were her closest friend.

It was all just an elaborate ruse to further him in his nosy pursuits. He always wanted to know whom Beatrice was speaking to. Whenever the telephone rang, he would dart into her room. “Is it for me?” he’d ask, though it never was. He simply needed an excuse to see who was calling.

Every one of Beatrice’s answers he found unsatisfactory.

“Which guy?”

“Do I know him?”

“Does he go to your school?”

As for Beatrice, she couldn’t decide which was harder: evading Calvin, or resisting the urge to tell him everything. She was frequently overwhelmed by a desire to flatten him with some shocking announcement. The sight of him checking for plaque, or sliding his trading cards into their plastic sleeves, or bobbing up and down to the Rock Hotel, filled her with a sort of mean-spirited abandon.

What would she tell him first?

Why 69 was a disgusting number. About a girl at her school who had slapped her own mother and knocked her glasses off. About girls who tortured other girls by cutting up magazines and sending them serial-killer letters. That Big Black’s new record would be called Songs About Fucking. That she now knew what landscaping was. What DIY was; and PCP; and DOA.

Sometimes she wanted to descend on her brother like a devastating angel and tell him every interesting thing she knew. But as it turned out, she didn’t have to.

“A man called,” Calvin said, holding the telephone. He stood in the doorway of Beatrice’s bedroom. “Looking for you. I told him you weren’t home.”

“Why did you do that?” Beatrice asked, as she tugged the telephone away from him.

“He sounded funny,” Calvin said. “He sounded like a creep.”

“He’s a friend,” Beatrice said.

“That man?”

“We talk a lot on the phone.”

“You do?” Calvin stared at her. “You talk to that man?”

“Stop saying that word!”

“What word?” he asked.

In her arms the telephone rang. She flinched, and put it down on her bed.

“Don’t answer it,” Calvin said.

“Of course I’m going to answer it. He’s my friend, he’s trying to reach me.”

“Don’t answer it. Don’t talk to that—” But he wasn’t allowed to say it.

The telephone kept ringing. She curled her fingers around the receiver.

“No!” Calvin said.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” Beatrice said, as she felt herself beginning to worry. “He’s not at the front door. It’s just the telephone.”

“I know,” Calvin said. “But please, don’t answer it. I think it would be a bad idea.”

He took her hands into his. They were hot and slightly sticky. Together she and Calvin sat on her bed, watching the telephone ring. By the time it stopped, Beatrice felt afraid.

“Do you think…,” she began, and then couldn’t finish the question.

If he appeared at their front door, she would not know him. Shred, she would know right away, by his beautiful long fingers and uncombed hair, the skeptical arch of his eyebrow, the leather cord he wore around his neck. But the person on the telephone had no face. He was neither straight nor stooped. His breath was not foul; his T-shirt was not clean or dirty; he had no birthmarks. He was neither nineteen nor forty-one. Without a harelip, a pierced ear; without a nose or a chin or a body. She did not wonder. She said only, “Hello.” She said, “Tell me something interesting.” He had a cough.

Her brother was looking at her in a peculiar way. His eyes moved over her face like it was a landscape and he was up in an airplane. His eyes said, I am not coming down there. But still they kept looking for a place to arrive.

Beatrice said, “He’s not very smart.”

“How do you know?”

“His job is mowing lawns,” she said. “He didn’t know what lozenges were. He believed it when I said I played guitar.”

Calvin’s eyes stood still.

“You believed he mows lawns.”

She twitched.

Then she covered her ears and squeezed her lids shut. “Stop staring at me,” she hissed. “Stop talking to me.”

“Sorry,” Calvin said, patting her arm. “Sorry.”

Soft, tiny blows fell on her arms and her shoulders.

“Turn off all the lights,” she told him. “Turn up the radio.”

In the darkness, she opened her eyes. The radio was glowing. And Shred was still talking, announcing songs, disparaging requests, saying, “This one goes out to…”

“Maglite,” Calvin whispered.

It was the most bludgeonlike thing either of them owned. The kind of flashlight that police officers and night watchmen used, the kind that required six enormous batteries, sliding down its cylinder with the cool weight of cannonballs. The Maglite lived inside Calvin’s room, a universe she was no longer so familiar with. She bumped into the umbrella stand that held his historic swords.

“Where are you, Calvin?”

He was crouching underneath the window. She reached out and touched his arm, and felt how he was cradling the flashlight. She acted like a blind person and touched him all over. He was still a citizen in that other country to which she had once belonged: all of a piece, flawless and moist, his chest lightly heaving like a hare’s. From the other room the telephone rang once, and stopped.

“Oh god,” Beatrice said. “Do you think they answered it?”

“I really hope not,” her brother said, and from all around her, she felt the faintest draft seep in, as faint as someone blowing out a candle.

She thought of warning them. But here, on the very top floor of her house, there were no buttons embedded in the walls. Those buttons existed downstairs, in the rooms with the long windows, where her mother and her father lived. From here it was impossible to give warning, to say important things, to speak of danger; it was possible only to be summoned.

They would pick up the phone. They would answer the door.

“Oh god,” she said.

Outside, something stirred. Something rustled through the trees and then stepped out onto the snow.

“Raccoon,” Calvin whispered.

But it didn’t sound like a raccoon, or a wild and mangy cat. It didn’t sound like a hawk alighting on the lawn. She had once believed that she lived among the fir trees and the night-roaming animals, but now she remembered the street that wrapped around one side of their house, the scream of tires as they hit the hairpin curve; she remembered the gas station at the top of the hill, and the telephone booth beneath its buzzing lights. Beside her, her brother softly heaved. She could hear the crunch of footfalls on the snow.

Then Calvin shot up. He was too fast. He threw open the window, and the cold air came tumbling in on them.

“Stop! Don’t move!” he cried.

“No!” Beatrice said, pulling on his leg. “Get down!”

“Kids?” a voice asked from below.

Beatrice stood up in surprise. Pressed against her brother, she peered out into the darkness. Calvin pushed the Maglite’s tender black button, and a beam of light fell into the yard.

A man looked back up at them. He was protecting his eyes with one hand. In the other he held a bright blue duffel bag. He wore a long dress coat, pinned to the lapel of which was the unwieldy fir tree that Beatrice had made in her ceramics class a year before. She could see it even from here.

“Papa?” she said.

“What are you kids doing up?” their father asked, trying to sound mad and quiet at the same time.

“We heard something,” Beatrice whispered back.

“What are you doing up?” Calvin wanted to know.

This question seemed to puzzle him. He dropped his hand to his side and lifted his duffel bag. “I was getting this from the car.”

Calvin kept the beam of light trained on their father. “It’s late!” Calvin said.

The light fell in a circle around him. Beyond that, Beatrice could make out the shape of trees rising up, and the untidy bushes, and the lopsided skeleton of the gazebo that he had begun building in the fall, but didn’t have time to finish. She thought she spied something rotund in the darkness, loping toward the trash cans. She saw the marks her father’s feet had left in the snow and the sharp shadow that his body threw onto the lawn. It was only her father. But something inside of her still clenched. It was only her father creeping about in the dark, and now he was standing there, holding his duffel bag, wearing her fir tree, his footsteps heading in one direction.

Tonight, she knew, he would go back inside. He would raise his voice, move furniture across the floor, and in the morning, around the table, the four of them would look into each other’s tired faces. But one night, another night — soon, she thought — there would be an apartment.

And suddenly it was no longer her word, her idea.

“Calvin,” she said. “Turn it off.”

Without the flashlight, her brother wouldn’t be able to see. She wrapped her hands around the cold cylinder and pulled.

But he did not let go. “No.” He said fiercely, “It’s late.”

From behind her came the sound of the radio, speaking into the emptiness of her bedroom. The voice said, “This kid who keeps calling me, he wants to hear the Clash. Now normally, I would never play the Clash. Yes, I know, we wouldn’t have punk rock without them, but I mean, you can hear the Clash on other radio stations. You can hear the Clash on oldies stations. We just don’t play the Clash here on the Rock Hotel,” Shred explained. “But this kid who called, he got me thinking about when I was his age, when I heard the Clash for the first time. I had never heard anything like them. London Calling—that record changed me. I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you if it wasn’t for that record. So I’m going to play that song, for that kid who called. What can I say? It’s a song of my youth.”