Voices in the Night: Stories

THE PLACE

1

It was known as the Place. Even as children we knew there was something wrong with a name like that — you couldn’t get a grip on it, the way you could get a grip on JoAnn’s Diner, or Indian Lake, or the Palace Cinema out on South Main. It was as if whoever had named it hadn’t thought very much about it, or hadn’t been able to make up his mind. Later, as we grew older, we thought the very wrongness of the name was what was right about it. It was like an empty room you could put things in. Still later, we no longer thought about the name at all. It was part of what was, like summer and night.

2

It’s easy to get there: just head north toward the hill at the end of town. As you get closer, the houses thin out and give way to car dealerships, a retirement community, and an enclosed mall next to an outdoor shopping plaza, before you reach a stretch of fields and woods. On the other side of the woods the hill begins. You can drive a short way up, but you have to leave your car in one of the paved lots and continue on foot. Half a dozen dirt trails start from the lots and wind to the top. It takes most people no more than twenty or thirty minutes to get there, though some like to rest on wooden benches scattered along the sides of the paths. If you don’t want to walk, a minibus will take you most of the way up, leaving from the main trailhead every half hour, nine to five during the week, ten to six on weekends. Everything’s shut down during the bad weather, first of November through the first of March. Radios and cell phones are strictly forbidden, but no one seems to miss them. You know it’s not like a trip to the shore of Indian Lake, two towns over, or to the picnic tables in Burrows Park. You know you haven’t come for that.

3

I remember my first visit, at the age of six or seven. I see myself holding my mother’s hand as we walk along an upward-sloping path, between fields of knee-high grass stretching away. I could feel the sun, warm on my arms. More and more sky kept appearing, as if we were pushing something aside that had been covering it up. I felt a familiar excitement, the kind I felt when we were on our way to the amusement park, with its wooden horses moving up and down on silver poles and its pink cotton candy shaking on paper cones, or the summer circus in the field by the river. I wondered whether the Place was a park with rides, or maybe a castle with a shop selling swords. “Here we are,” my mother said, when we reached the end of the path. I remember standing still and turning my head from side to side, with a kind of desperation, thinking: There’s nothing here. The other thing I remember is the change in my mother’s face. In those days I always had my mother’s complete attention. Even when I was apart from her I knew she was thinking about me, worrying about me, taking pleasure in my existence. But up there, at the Place, something had shifted. It wasn’t that she had let go of my hand, because she often let go when she knew I was safe. It was that she somehow wasn’t there with me. I thought she must be looking at something, but when I tried to follow her gaze I could tell that she wasn’t looking at anything at all. Later, when she drew me to her side and pointed to the little town far below, I gave it a harsh glance and looked away. After a while I began kicking at a stone in the grass.

4

Sometimes a feeling comes. You’re walking along a sidewalk, some Saturday afternoon in summer. You’re passing through the sun and shade of maples and old oaks, past the familiar yards and porches of your neighborhood. Mrs. Witowski is kneeling on her cushion at the side of the hollyhock bush, jabbing at the soil with her weeder. The Anderson kid is lifting a two-pane cellar window from the back of his Honda; he’s going to fit it into the wood-framed space in the concrete strip at the base of the house, where you can see two wing nuts that he will turn to hold the frame in place. The lawn mowers are out; in the warm air there’s a smell of cut grass, lilac, and fresh tar. The sun feels good on your arms. All at once the feeling comes. It isn’t restlessness, exactly. It’s the unmistakable feeling, precise as a knife-cut, that you need to be elsewhere. The street is hemming you in, pressing against you, making it impossible to breathe. This is the feeling that tells you to return to your house, get in your car, and head out to the Place.

5

It’s difficult to describe what’s there. Unlike Burrows Park or the South Side Rec Field, the Place has no boundary, though it’s true enough that the Place is located at the top of the hill. The hill slopes up to a flattish top that might be thought of as a plateau, with dips and rises of its own. Just where the top of the hill begins or ends, who can say? Up there, you have a good view in all directions. At one end you can see the woods and fields at the base of the hill, then the little red-roofed buildings of the retirement community, the country road, and, farther off, the town itself — Main Street with its shops and tiny cars, the roof of the Van Buren Hotel, the residential section, the pond, the park, all so small that it takes you by surprise. Beyond the town you can see other towns, a village with a white church steeple, twisting roads, a ribbon of highway, patches of farmland, a band of low hills. On all sides of the plateau you can see far-off places. The plateau is grassy, with stretches of bare rock, a scattering of wildflowers, small stands of oak and pine, a few blueberry bushes. Here and there you can find benches, the old-fashioned kind with wooden slats, which the town has seen fit to provide for tired travelers. The most striking feature of the Place is the dozen or so crumbling stone walls, about the height of your waist, that run for twenty or thirty feet, in different directions, along the grass of the plateau. The Historical Society says that they’re old property walls, erected by farmers in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, though opinion is divided about whether crops were grown and whether any buildings once stood on the plateau. One historian claims that the walls are not farmers’ walls at all, but the remains of a Native American settlement dating back to the mid-sixteenth century. You can walk along the low walls, sit down on them, or ignore them, as you please. Sometimes you see praying mantises, field mice, a red-tailed hawk. The plateau doesn’t drop off sharply, but slopes gently down on all sides, so that, as I have said, it’s difficult to know where anything begins and ends. The appearance of the Place is what I’ve attempted to describe, but the attempt itself is questionable. It isn’t so much what the Place looks like, after all, as what it does to you.

6

Just as stories collect around old, abandoned mansions, so rumors swirl about the Place. Sometimes the rumors gather so thickly that you have to push your way through them, in order to find the Place at all. Some say the Place was once the site of an ancient monument to the Great Spirit, erected by the ancestral branch of a little-known tribe. Some claim that the Place has life-enhancing powers that cure disease, increase longevity, and reverse memory loss. The Place, some say, contains energy fields that allow you to perceive past events and to communicate with the dead. Although most of us scorn such rumors, which cheapen the Place and threaten to turn it into a psychic parlor, we understand that in some way the rumors are part of what the Place is: the Place summons them, calls them into being, as surely as it gives rise to yellow violets, prickly milkweed pods, and tall, nubbly spikes of mullein.

7

In the spring of junior year in high school I began spending time with Dan Rivers. He had moved to our town in December from somewhere in Colorado, and he was the kind of guy I had always avoided — handsome, sure of himself, easy in his body, easy with girls. Everyone liked Dan Rivers. Maybe because I made a point of being polite and distant, he began to seek me out. One day he walked home from school with me. He started coming to the house, where we played chess and talked books; on the sunny back porch he’d sit on one of the wicker chairs and tell my mother stories about small-town Colorado and listen to her tales of the Lower East Side. In the living room he’d sit in the armchair by the piano and talk to my father about the problem of free will or the correspondence theory of truth. I felt in him a readiness for friendship, a desire to penetrate to the core of another temperament. We spoke about our ambitions, our dreams. One Saturday morning he drove over and said he wanted to see the Place. I hadn’t been there since the time with my mother. We drove out past the car dealerships, the cluster of attached retirement homes, past the mall and the shopping plaza, entered the woods, and came to the hill. We parked in a paved lot bordered by wooden posts and began our way up a curving trail. Field grass stretched away on both sides; the sun warmed my arms. I remembered walking with my mother, remembered the leather purse slung over her shoulder, the shadow of her hat on the upper part of her face. At the top of the path Dan Rivers and I turned to look at the view. Far off, in the little town, I could see our high school, the roof of the Equity Trust on Main, a corner of Burrows Park. I turned to Dan Rivers, who was looking at the same view, but I could feel something else in him, something that reminded me of the change in my mother’s face. I went off and sat on one of the walls. I could feel the warm stone pressing against the calves of my jeans. After a while I walked to the far end of the plateau, where I looked out at a brown river, a factory smokestack, blue hills. A few other people were strolling around. It was quiet up there; I was a talker, but this was no place for talk. Dan Rivers came over to me, sat down, got up, walked around. An hour later we headed back down to the car. The next day he went back to the Place alone. On Monday he didn’t come over to the house. He began driving out to the Place, day after day; he withdrew from his clubs, stopped going to parties, seemed preoccupied. He rarely came over to the house anymore, said he was busy. Once or twice, when we passed each other in the halls, he invited me to drive out there with him. Some other time, I said. When we did get together, now and then, he wanted only to talk about the Place, but at the same time he didn’t really want to talk about it. He said that it cleared his mind, helped him get rid of things. What things, I wanted to know. Mind-junk, he said, and gave that one-shoulder shrug of his. I could feel a new hiddenness in him; he had stepped into himself and closed the door, shut the blinds. When I learned in June that he was moving with his family to Austin, Texas, in July, I felt that we had already said our goodbyes. The day after he left for Texas, I decided to visit the Place alone.

8

Though you might not think so to look at us, our town attracts summer visitors. We’re especially sought out by big-city people, who love the idea of getting away from it all, of escaping from the pressures of urban life into what they believe is a peaceful, simple existence. But we’re also well liked by residents in surrounding small towns, who are drawn to our outdoor cafés, our shops and restaurants, and our lively nightlife, with its dance clubs and jazz bars. The summer visitors stay at our two inns, with rooms decorated in period styles, at our renovated nineteenth-century hotel, and at a variety of bed-and-breakfasts and family-friendly motels, or they rent our homes by the month. Everyone likes our tree-lined downtown, with its small, locally owned shops and quaint restaurants, its shady wooden benches and its ice-cream parlors, though we also have our share of luxury boutiques and high-end clothing shops. Burrows Park, with its picnic tables, its stream, and its children’s playground, is always popular; there are outdoor concerts in July. Not far outside our town lies Indian Lake, where you can swim or rent a canoe or walk the trails; a little farther away you can find a wildlife sanctuary, a golf course, and a restored eighteenth-century village with craft shops and a museum. The summer visitors also come for the Place. They walk to the top of the hill, stroll around, admire the view, and go back down. Few return, especially when they learn that no picnics are allowed up there. The summer people can irritate us, but we also find them interesting: they make us wonder what the Place must feel like, to those who can never be anything except what they already are.

9

I don’t know what I expected, the day I went up to the Place alone. I suppose I was hoping to discover whatever it was that had pulled Dan Rivers to it, time after time. It was a hot July morning. I walked around the Place, noticing again that it was no single flatness but a series of small slopes and declines, so that it was possible, even at the top of the hill, to find yourself in a shallow valley. I walked beside the low walls that ran here and there along the rises and dips, stepped through fields of grass showing traces of overgrown paths, passed a man sitting under a tree sketching with charcoal on a large pad that he held on his knees. After a time I sat down against a low stone wall, in warm shade, with the sun behind me. Farther down was another stone wall, broken in places; in the distance I saw blue-green hills. It was peaceful enough up there, though peace wasn’t what I had come for. I didn’t know what I had come for. In the warmth and shade a drowsiness came over me. I did not fall asleep, for I was seventeen years old and filled with energy, but I sat very still and imagined that anyone watching me would think that I had fallen into a deep sleep. I then saw a woman approaching my wall. She wore a white dress that came down to her ankles and a white sun hat tilted low on her face. Although there was nothing peculiar about her, except for the whiteness of her clothes, I had the sense that I was having one of those half-waking dreams, from which at any moment I might awake. She drew near without seeming to see me, then looked down at me from under her hat and began walking away along the wall, glancing back as if she expected me to follow. I rose without hesitation and began walking after her, though with the sensation that I was still sitting there, with one hand resting on the grass, in the warm shade. She soon came to the end of the wall. There she began going down through an opening in the earth. I followed her down the rough stone steps, which changed direction from time to time, and when the steps ended I found myself in a high, narrow corridor, with doors on both sides. The woman in the white dress was walking swiftly along the corridor, toward a closed door at the far end. She opened the door and disappeared inside, but not before glancing at me over her shoulder. I passed through the open door and entered a vast room or hall, trembling with light. On both sides I saw immensely tall windows through which brightness poured. In the hall stood many long tables at which people were seated; their faces and arms were shining, as if illuminated from within. A stern, gentle man in a white robe led me along the side of one of the tables. As I walked behind him, I could scarcely make anything out because of the brightness. Then I seemed to see, on the opposite side, Dan Rivers quivering in the light. In another place I saw my mother, leaning her cheek on the palm of a hand. The man led me to an empty chair with a high back; it was difficult for me to climb onto the seat. Before me he placed an open book with pages so large that I wondered whether I would be able to reach far enough to turn them. The white room, the blazing windows, the open book, filled me with a sense of peaceful excitement, as if I had found a place I hadn’t known I was looking for. As I bent over the white book, which contained words that would explain everything, a stillness came over me, an inner ease, as if I had let go of something, slowly my body began to bend forward, and when my forehead pressed against the page I felt a yielding, a dissolving, I was passing through, at the back of my head a hardness was starting to gather, and I found myself sitting against the stone wall, in the warm shade. Instantly I shut my eyes and attempted to recapture the white dress, the stairway, the brilliant room, but through my closed eyelids I saw only dancing points of sun. I stood up. I felt a new lightness, as if something heavy had drained away. Call it a dream, call it a drowsy sun-vision on a lazy summer day, but it had come to me from up there, it was mine. I spent the rest of the day walking to the far ends of the Place, in search of a white dress that I knew did not exist, though I also knew that the Place had somehow summoned it. It had me now. It had me. Before I left, I carefully examined the end of my wall, where I knew there would be no stairway. Only a few fallen stones among dusty blades of grass, only a yellow wildflower, and a heavy bee hovering above a blossom of clover.

10

We call them the Halfway Climbers. These are the ones who begin the ascent but stop partway, attracted by the wooden benches placed along the paths, or by the small clearings that invite repose. There they sit down, enjoy the view, perhaps take out a small bottle of energy drink concealed in their clothes. Sometimes they spread out towels in the sun, lie down, and close their eyes; sometimes they read the paper or watch their children wade in a stream. After a while they may move farther up to another bench, another clearing, a better view. But they do not climb to the top, and the time always comes when they decide they’ve had enough, and so they return to their cars and drive home. The question we have about the Halfway Climbers is this: Why do they come at all? To be fair, the views along the way are very fine; on a clear day, you can pick out many buildings in our miniature town and look out at the distant villages and hills. But not far above is the Place itself, the very reason to come at all. The Halfway Climbers know that the Place is there, just at the top of the trail. Why do they stop? Can it be that their only desire is to move toward the Place without actually reaching it? It’s tempting to think of the Halfway Climbers as lazy, but this is unlikely to be true, since many of them walk most of the way up and often pass us with vigorous strides. Is it possible that the Place frightens them in some way? Do they fear a change in themselves that they can’t bear to face? Perhaps what they want is only to escape from the town for a short time but not to arrive anywhere else, since to arrive might be to weaken their connection to the town — a connection that escape only strengthens. Another explanation is possible. Do they hope for so much from the Place that, filled with doubt, they refuse to climb all the way, in order to avoid disillusionment? They interest us, these Halfway Climbers. Almost to arrive, almost to experience what is tempting and unimaginable — for them, is it really enough?

11

In senior year of high school I fell in love with Diane DeCarlo. I knew it was love because I didn’t only want to touch and be touched by her all over our bodies, I wanted to touch and be touched by her all over our minds. Sometimes I thought of her as a sunny house I wanted to move into for the rest of my life. We read our favorite children’s books to each other, explored each other’s attics, sneaked into each other’s houses at night. Mostly we laughed and went driving around together in my father’s car. One day I took her up to the Place. I’d been going up a lot since Dan Rivers moved away, and though I never saw the lady in white again I felt good up there, as if I could get rid of something for a while. I wanted Diane to see the Place with me, the way I wanted her to see my room, my body, my childhood bear with the missing arm. It was a sunny day in spring, one of those days that make you want to burst out laughing, because it looks as if it’s trying too hard to imitate your idea of a perfect spring day. As we climbed the path, she was taking it all in — the green fields, the wildflowers, a light green grasshopper on a dark green bench. We were holding hands, swinging our arms. When we reached the top she closed her eyes and raised her face to the sun, her cheeks shining in the light as if they were wet. “I love it up here,” she said, and gave me one of her tender, playful looks. “What’s wrong?” she said. I remembered the time I’d come up to the Place with my mother, but things were now reversed: I saw in Diane’s eyes the look that must have been mine as a child, when my mother did not give me her attention. “Nothing,” I said. I understood what a fool I’d been, inviting her up here, where she craved intimacy and I wanted — but who knew what I wanted? I knew only that the Place was not for holding hands and staring out together at pretty views. I felt angry at myself, and angry at the Place, and sorry for her. Under the blue sky we walked uneasily side by side, sat down on one of the walls, looked about. We returned to the car in silence. I continued seeing Diane after that, but I never took her back to the Place, and we broke up two weeks before graduation.

12

Some call it the Great Revulsion. That’s when you suddenly turn against the Place, for no reason you can understand. The stone walls seem to give you a hostile stare; the sky is a hand pushing against your neck. In the stillness you can almost hear voices calling to you from the town. And so you hurry back to the world below, where you laugh with friends, drive out with your wife and kids to the picnic tables at Burrows Park, plan vacations to the seashore. You can’t understand why you ever wasted your precious time at the dead top of a boring hill, while life was swirling down below. Sometimes you forget the Place for a month, for a year. But a time comes when the town begins to irritate you with its familiar roof slopes, its clatter of cups on café tables on Main Street, its shimmering water-jets from lawn sprinklers, its creaking porch gliders. Then you remember the Place, up there, away from it all, and you are shaken: by remorse, by longing, by gratitude.

13

Because the Place is owned by our town, maintained by the Parks and Recreation Department, and paid for by our taxes, it is not surprising that voices are regularly raised in favor of a different use of the land. The Town Board is repeatedly asked to consider business proposals from local groups and outside developers eager to convert the Place to profitable use. One of the more popular plans is for a six-story hotel, with spacious balconies, a farm-to-table menu, and an outdoor café open to the public. Other development projects include a thirty-two-unit town-house-style apartment complex, a private school for girls, a family-owned restaurant with an Irish pub, an assisted-living facility, a recreation center with weight rooms and indoor pools, and a medical building specializing in dementia care. All proposals are presented for voting at town meetings held throughout the year. Those of us who defend the Place against business designs that are clear, well thought out, and of undeniable financial advantage to the town are often hard put to say what it is about the Place that makes us want to maintain it in its unprofitable state.

14

In college I hurled myself into books and friendships as if I had only a few months left to live. I took up fencing, joined the debating club, stayed up till five in the morning arguing about whether happiness is the true goal of human life. I spent the summers at home, working odd jobs and visiting college friends on weekends; I thought of going up to the Place but somehow never got around to it. The Place was like an old board game that I thought of fondly but no longer played. At the same time, it represented a temptation that I needed to resist: the temptation of falling back into a small-town adolescence I longed to transcend. After college I returned home for the summer, during which I prepared my résumé and interviewed for jobs that I thought of as experiments, while I waited to discover my real work, whatever that might be. When I was hired as an entry-level paralegal in a medical malpractice law firm located in a city two hours away, I began making trips to search for an apartment. On the day before I left home, I drove over to the hill. I had been saying my goodbyes, and I suppose this was another. As I walked up the path under the August sun, I asked myself what I thought I was doing. At the top I looked around. Except for a slatted metal bench that had replaced one of the old wooden ones, nothing had changed. It struck me that each blade of grass was in the precise position it had held when I had last been here. That was in the summer before college, when I worked at one of the concession stands at the South Side Rec Field, went swimming at Indian Lake with friends, and mostly stayed away from the Place, with its memories of Diane DeCarlo. I’d last gone up at summer’s end and stared hard, as at something already slipping away. Now I walked about, gazed down at the town, sat against a wall, where the edges of stones pushed into my back, and quickly stood up. I could feel myself waiting for something, without knowing what it was. I glared at the grassy slopes, the distant hills, as if I expected them to speak aloud. And an impatience came over me. Why had I come here? I was starting a new life. This was the old life, the time of childhood birthday parties and family picnics in the park and Dan Rivers and Diane DeCarlo. I remembered the white dress, the blazing room, but that was only a summer dream. The Place held nothing for me; I was so filled with the future that I was barely in a place at all. Still I waited, demanding that the Place give me something, anything — whatever it was I had come for. I felt like bursting into wild laughter, like crouching down and pounding the ground with my fists. I opened my mouth, as if to shout. Then I glanced at my watch and turned back toward the car.

15

Some people say that the Place is the realm of the spirit, as opposed to the realm of the body. Down below, we feed and clothe our bodies, we work at our jobs, we eat and marry and die. Up above, where our bodies are freed from worldly concerns, our spirits can flourish unimpeded, as we enter a place of contemplation, serenity, and quiet exaltation. This explanation, attractive to those who welcome the Place as a spiritual retreat, as well as to those who ignore the Place but accept that it may be of value to others, is not convincing. One of the pleasures of the Place is the sheer delight our bodies feel, high above the strains and tensions of the town below. The air, fresher and cleaner, is drawn deeply into the lungs, the way a thirsty throat receives cool water; the body is invigorated, filled with an energy that feels nourishing rather than restless. At the same time, it’s surely a mistake to think of the town as occupied solely with material things. Down there is where we read, think, go to school, attend piano recitals, make moral choices, experience the ecstasy we call love. If the Place is where we leave the town-world for something else, then we leave all of it, including our most cherished adventures of the spirit. What the Place invites is a withdrawal from all human things — a withdrawal that is like a surrender.

16

On her thirtieth birthday, Lucy Wheeler stood in her sunny-and-shady backyard surrounded by friends and family, who were laughing and telling stories and walking about with glasses of wine and paper plates of shrimp and barbecued chicken, she was looking at the red and yellow balloons her husband had tied to the branches of the old sugar maple, and half-closing her eyes she felt the happiness of her life flowing through her like sunlight through wine. At the same time she had the sensation that she was standing a little apart from herself, watching Lucy Wheeler as she stood there with a flush of happiness on her face, a striking face with its almost dark eyebrows and its rich blond hair pulled loosely back. She had been having these little moments of self-separation lately, these rifts, as she liked to call them, and now, as she stood among her friends and felt her happiness streaming through her, she had a sudden desire to leave herself standing there and walk away, out of the yard, out of her life, a desire so sharp that it made her look around quickly, as if she were afraid that something hard and cold had appeared in her face. The next day, when her husband was at the office and her children were at Jody Gelber’s house for the afternoon, Lucy Wheeler drove out to the Place. She had climbed up there once with her husband when she’d moved to our town six years ago, and she had admired the view. Now she stood alone at the top of a rise and felt something fall away from her. She remained standing there for a while and was startled to see on her watch that three hours had passed. She’d forgotten the kids, already her husband was on his way home, she still had to pick up some chicken breasts for dinner. She began driving over to the Place every day, after arranging for friends to care for the children. At night she would wake up at four in the morning, longing for the moment when she could return. At dinner she caught her daughter looking at her. “Is everything all right?” her husband asked one evening, and for a moment she did not remember who he was. One Saturday she drove out to the Place and stayed until the sun was setting behind the distant hills. At home she felt guilty, apologetic, defiant. A week later she stayed beyond sunset, beyond closing time. She wanted to watch the darkening of the sky, the fullness of night. She lay on her back on a low slope below one of the walls. When she heard a car driving up from the trailhead, she understood that someone was coming for her, and she thought of hiding, but what was the point. She heard the footsteps and saw the dark policeman drawing near. She thought: I am so happy. Is there something wrong with me? She thought: Now my life will never be the same.

17

After six years in the city, during which I met my wife, completed a law degree, and went to work in the legal department of City Hall, I moved back to my old town in order to raise a family. I had never thought of myself as the kind of person who would move back to his old town, but there I was, in a house with a porch on a shady street in a good school district. I worked in a local family-practice law firm specializing in mediation, divorce, and child support, and later was able to set up my own practice. We entered a life of backyard cookouts, neighborhood block parties, day care, ballet lessons, baseball practice, family vacations at a camp on a lake. I was in love with my wife, my family, my work. Smiles burst from me like breaths. One summer afternoon the two of us, Lily and I, drove out to the Place, where we sat on a bench and held hands as we looked down at the town. A week later I returned alone. I hadn’t been up there by myself for ten years, and I don’t know what it was I expected, now that I was done thinking of myself as a son and a student, but it was as if I wanted to set something right. The memory of my failed visit burned in me. I saw that I had done everything wrong that day — I had made demands on the Place, as though it owed me something. This time I asked for nothing. I merely wanted to get away from the town, for a while. Though the weather was warm, the sky was filling with dark clouds. I walked along the stone walls, under the stormy sky; down below, in the distance, I could see rain falling in slanted lines beside a burst of sun. I became aware of a sensation that was almost physical: a tightness, an inner thickness, was passing out of me. I glanced at my hands, as if I expected to see something flowing from my fingers. I sat down against a wall. I could feel my back against the stone, my legs against the ground. It’s difficult to say what I felt next. I’m tempted to call it a contentment, a deep peacefulness, but it was more powerful than that — it was like a dissolution, an unknitting of whatever it was I was. I was the stone in the wall, I was the grass in the field, I was the honeybee hovering above the blossom of clover, I was all, I was nothing at all. When the rain came, I remained sitting there. I could feel the water streaming down my face, beating against my shirt, blurring my edges, slanting through me.

18

There are those who do not like the Place. They point to extreme cases, such as that of Lucy Wheeler, as well as to many lesser instances of confusion, emotional disturbance, and psychic turmoil. The Place, they say, is a force of destruction, which undermines our town by drawing us away from healthy pursuits into a world of sickly dreaming. Many who defend the Place against such charges argue that it produces beneficial, life-enhancing effects, which are not only valuable in themselves but useful in strengthening the health of the town. Others insist that the terms of attack are false: life in our town is not by definition healthy, and events associated with the Place are in no sense sickly. Still others argue that the Place is an essential feature of the town, for without it the town would lack awareness of itself and, in that sense, would no longer be human. For those of us who welcome the Place but don’t claim to have penetrated its mystery, the arguments of its enemies are of special value. We ponder them, we develop subtle refinements and variations of our own, we do everything in our power to strengthen the case against ourselves, in an effort to lay bare what is hidden from us.

19

I was standing in a large hall, filled with people who looked like bizarre versions of themselves. Or more exactly: they looked like teenagers who had dressed up playfully, using a great deal of makeup and their parents’ clothes, in order to present to the world the older selves they imagined they would one day become. I had never attended a high-school reunion before. I’d planned not to attend this one, the fortieth, but at the last moment I yielded to an unexpected impulse of curiosity. As I stood trying to decide between two drinks that matched our school colors, I wondered whether I, too, resembled an unconvincing performer of myself, and at that moment I happened to see, standing some ten feet away, Dan Rivers. He was looking directly at me. I recognized him at once — the same eyebrows, the same quick smile, the same ease in his body. Not entirely the same, of course; but it was as though his features and gestures had settled into a more complete and unshakeable version of themselves. “I was hoping,” he said, coming up to me and reaching out both hands. “It’s been a while.” “If forty years is a while,” I said, taking his hands, larger than I remembered but still lean and tight. “I kept meaning to get in touch,” he said, “but, you know”—and there it was, that slow, one-shoulder shrug. “But now,” he said, “we can do some catching up.” We fell into the old easy talk, two seventeen-year-old boys in the bodies of aging men. Dan Rivers was married, with two kids; he was an architect; he had designed dams and bridges. At some point I asked whether he’d ever gone back to visit the Place. I suppose I wondered whether he remembered. “Oh that,” he said, with his boyish laugh. “Of course I remember it — junior year. That phase I went through. My son used to play fantasy games on his PC six hours a day. It all works itself out.” We talked family, travel, the cost of college. When I suggested he come over to the house, he looked at me with genuine distress. “I’d love to — but I’ve got to get back home. A conference. I was lucky to get away at all. But next time — next time — absolutely.” “Absolutely,” I said. He gave me a warm, long look. “I’m glad we met up,” he said. Someone was tugging at his arm. “Is it Emily?” he cried. “I can’t believe it!” “Hi, Emily,” I said. “Has it really been forty years?” she said. “It seems like yesterday.”

20

Some claim that the invigorating effects of the Place derive from natural causes. The fresh air, free from the fumes emitted by cars, buses, utility vehicles, lawn mowers, gas-powered edgers and trimmers, and the old smokestacks of the electric plant two towns over, contains more oxygen than the air below; the increase of oxygen to the brain facilitates the release of neurotransmitters that promote a sense of happiness and well-being. In addition, each breath of air strengthens the immune system, increases energy, and sharpens the ability to think clearly, while the abundance of natural light stimulates the body’s manufacture of vitamin D, which improves bone density and helps maintain hormone balance. Although no one denies the benefits of fresh air and sunlight, those of us who support the Place for other reasons are not fond of the Argument from Nature. Its immediate flaw is that it fails to distinguish the Place from any other elevated rural spot. Its more serious flaw is that it attempts to domesticate the Place, to tame it down, to lower it to the level of the town. The Place becomes an open-air health facility, a rival of the new gym on Auburn Avenue. But the Place, for those of us who try to grasp its meaning, is not an extension of the town. It is what the town is not. It is the shedding of the town, the annihilation of the town. It is the un-town.

21

Not long ago I went up to the Place and sat on a warm bench, from which I could look down on the little town. In the clear air I was able to see the construction site where the new condos are going up and the nearly completed parking garage on North Main. I thought: Now you’ve become one of the bench-people, coming up for the view. But in fact I was only resting, after the long climb. My legs are still strong, but my heart has taken to pounding on uphill walks — it’s the sort of thing Lily would have urged me to see a doctor about. But all I need is a little rest, before continuing on my way. After a while I got up from my bench and took a walk along the familiar walls, stopping to feel the heat of the upper stones that faced the sun. I asked nothing of the Place. I wanted only to get away from the town, where the edges of houses had begun to glitter like knife blades. And I suppose I’d been thinking of all the recent talk about taking down the stone walls, filling up the dips and hollows, and turning the level land into a high-tech business park, a change that would create scores of jobs and drive property values sky-high. Ever since my wife’s passing, my son, a lawyer himself, has been urging me to sell the house and move into assisted living, but I’m used to the way the light falls in every room and have no desire to leave. In the warm sun I slowly climbed a slope. I could feel my heart starting to pound again. When I came to a wall at the top, I saw, in a field on the other side, a woman in a white dress. She was facing the other way. And I was moved, deeply moved, that she had come back to me, after all these years. I was not surprised that she had remained young, as though no time had passed since I was a boy of seventeen. For all I knew, I was still sitting against that wall, with my eyes half closed, waiting for my life to begin. The young woman wore no hat. Her hair, light brown, fell halfway down her back, and she stood with one foot slightly turned in and one hand holding the elbow of her other arm. A moment later I realized that she was a friend’s daughter from town, standing there with a white pocketbook over her shoulder. She must have come up as I had. She did not see me watching, and I turned away, so as not to disturb her. The sight of the girl in white soothed and excited me, as if I had been given the gift of witnessing the past and seeing the future. From a nearby wall a shiny black grackle, shimmering with purple, rose suddenly into the air.

22

Those who think they know us have sometimes called us the Discontents. At any moment, they say, we will leave our backyards and porches and living room couches, we will rise from our restaurant tables, put down our lawn mowers and garden hoses, abandon our families and friends, and head out to the Place. We will park at one of the lots and climb a winding trail, sometimes resting along the way, until we have reached the top. But scarcely have we come to the fields and stone walls when we are seized by a desire to return to the town below, with its softball games and ATM machines and outdoor barbecues. Restlessly we move back and forth between the two worlds, never satisfied, never at rest. To such arguments we make no reply. We are tempted to say: And you? Are you so pleased with yourselves? Or even: Rest is for the dead. Instead we continue to pass back and forth between the town and the Place, in a rhythm that feels more necessary than restfulness. To have one without the other would seem to us a deprivation, even a punishment. The weight of the town would sooner or later drag us down; the lightness of the Place would release us into empty air. Far better to pass between the two, leaving behind the streets of the town to seek the moment of letting go, leaving the heights to return to the satisfying tug of things. There are those who argue that the town and the Place are nothing but outward and visible signs of an inward and invisible truth: the town and the Place, they insist, lie within. To this I can say only that I do not understand such things. For me, it’s a matter of waiting for the time to come. Then I know that I must leave the town and drive out to the hill. You might say that I go up to the Place only in order to come down again, or that I go down to the town only in order to return to the Place. It may be so. That’s for others to decide. But if you want to know more about it, it’s best to see for yourself. Come. It’s easy enough to find us. We’re right here. Come for the day. You can have lunch in one of our outdoor cafés, where you can watch the tourists passing by. You can take a stroll along Main Street, stopping to look into a shop or two. Then it’s time to set out for the hill. You’ll pass the car dealerships, and the red-roofed buildings of the retirement community, and the mall and the outdoor shopping plaza, before reaching the woods. On the other side, you can drive partway up the hill and park in one of the lots. Get out and have a look around. Start up a trail. You can rest along the way, if you like. There’s no hurry. It isn’t far. Come.